On the Fedora Board
Now that I'm on the Fedora Project Board, you may be wondering what my plans are. The first answer is - ideally - not much! Ideally, no one posts semi-nude material on the planet, we all cooperate nicely on the mailing lists, and in general the construction of a Free Software operating system and applications basically runs itself, and I can spend most of my time working on code too. However, we aren't quite in an ideal state, so let me give you a sense of my thoughts and goals.
First, at a high level, I'd like Fedora to be more like Mozilla, which is arguably the most successful Free Software project ever. They do a lot of things extremely well, and we would do well to learn from them. I'll elaborate a bit more on this later. But I think a lot of us inside the project should ask ourselves "How does Mozilla do it"?
Second, I'll do all I can to prevent or work through intrapersonal conflicts inside the project. These have been a very serious problem for us, and we have to remember that we share the same goals. Being on the Board doesn't give me any more actual powers here at the moment, possibly just a slightly higher platform from which to say, pretty please. (I have personally been part of the problem in the past, and that's something I've been trying very hard to fix).
Third, be a part of the vision/what-is-Fedora/target audience discussions. I have a fairly strong opinion on these in general, which let me give a one sentence description here:
Fedora - A project to produce a Free Software general purpose operating system and applications through the process of rough consensus and working code.
Target Audience - Ok, this one is hard to fit in a single sentence, but I think the current proposal is a good start.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, spend most of my time on the code!
(Anonymous)
How Mozilla does it
Re: How Mozilla does it
Mozilla still gets 40% of their contributions from external contributors (ref http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/20
I'm thinking more about their focus on one single thing, with one single brand around it, the focus on the quality of that one thing, etc.
Also their development process (build sheriff, talos), etc.
(Anonymous)
Re: How Mozilla does it
Re: How Mozilla does it
Forever will it dominate your destiny
Blinded by the increased user base and money from Google in direct relation with the user base they became arrogant, acting pretty much like a corporation and forgetting the FOSS. If this continues, there is a big chance they will have their lunch stolen in a few years by WebKit powered browsers.
I disagree they've been "forgetting FOSS"; the push for Theora, and all the substantial work done in 3.0 and since for better desktop theming and integration. Clearly Firefox and the rest of their projects are still FOSS.
But this discussion is less interesting to me than the things that I know they do right, and that we don't do now; as mentioned above, e.g. the build sheriffing and product focus.
UI integration
(Anonymous)
Don’t Tell the Kids