Fedora and the world

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Jonathan Roberts
<jonrob at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> I agree that it would strengthen the Fedora brand, but that shouldn't
> be the only reason we would do something like this. IMHO, it's the
> right thing to do, and some steps that we could take might be as
> simple as thinking carefully about some of the things I suggested in
> my first e-mail.

Let me suggest that there are an infinite number of 'right' things we
could do with Fedora's brand capital.  And I don't think we are in a
position to sustain an effort to do something like crush poverty in
Africa at the moment, because we aren't Bono. We aren't.. we just
aren't. We really don't have the name recognition to be a force that
impacts perception across all possible large scale social issues. Hell
we aren't even in a position of strength to champion women's equality
in the development world as a mechanism towards economic and political
stablization..because we don't have equitable numbers of female
contributors ourselves.

If and when we stand up for something, we are essentially trading on
our brand in an effort to bring attention to the issue.   We need to
be clever about which social issues we do champion such that when we
so that over time it adds to our ability to continue doing it.

Now energy consumption, we could definitely take a stand on...because
everything we do as part of this project is essentially working
against the goals of energy conservation at the moment..as is all open
collaborative work being done primarily via the internet. Getting out
in front and taking a stand there, would make some sense... if I cared
at all about the issue.  But since I get a check every year which is
tied directly to the price of oil as an Alaskan citizen, I'm all for
people driving Humvees.. and I don't mean the new small ones.. i mean
military grade ones. Though Google's datacentres far outpace our
combined evilness when it comes to energy burnrate.

-jef"FYI, the Simon's movie was dead on about Alaska"spaleta