Easy Fedora 2

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 12/1/06, jam at zoidtechnologies.com <jam at zoidtechnologies.com> wrote:
> a valid point-- however users want these things and if it's "too difficult"

i want a pony.  It's over there in that field marked no traspassing.
All you have to do is open the gate and go get it and bring it to me.
Give me that pony. Give it to me now. No, I don't mind if its dead.
No, feel free to keep beating it after its dead, I still want it.


> to get them installed and operational they will go elsewhere.

Having everyone use fedora.. is not the point. It absolutely is not the point.
The point is building a future where everyone, everywhere, has equal
access to the tools to be self-sufficient digital technology builders
and consumers,  We are not going to shirk the responsibility for the
sake of today's proprietary technological whims. Its a waste of effort
and a road to nowhere. The scare resource is not userbase, the scarce
resource is competent technical development  manpower, especially
hardware specific competence. It would be a nearly criminal
mismanagement of resources to expend developer time on technology that
could not be openly diagnosed and fixed.

We shall not offer technology that we can not supoport as a community.
We shall not offer technology that we can not legally provide to everyone.

> like the original poster, I applaud the idea of sticking to the guns and not shipping
> any "grey" content, but that does *not* solve the problem for the vast
> majority of potential fedora users, and the matter needs to be addressed
> rather soon if we want to have a serious set of desktop users.

So what if we don't win a sizable fraction of today's desktops?  That
has never been the goal.
I will state, emphatically, that we have more than enough Fedora
desktop users right now, to continue to drive interest in development
of desktop components of Fedora forward. No rational person can argue
otherwise.  The grotesquely productivity-destroying desktop effects in
FC6 are but one example of continued progress in desktop development,
which sadly works just fine on my intel box with integrated graphics.
 The future of this project does not need a significant injection of
additional desktop users to flourish.. and we have no reason to be
greedy about collecting them. Desktop users are not pogs and they are
not pokemon.. we do not in fact have a mandate to collect even most of
them.  If people do not want to use Fedora as their desktop and would
prefer another Linux distribution, that is an absolutely acceptable
outcome.  Choice is good, we do not have to be the best choice for
most people right now, or tomorrow, or next year. All we need to do is
concentrate on building better choices for everyone in the long run.
And I will also, emphatically state, that future users need a complete
open source technology stack far far more than most of them currently
realize. Fedora is working on that critical long term need, in unsung
heroic fashion.

-jef"I'm more than happy to see Fedora skip the desktop paradigm
completely and focus on what comes next: neural implants,
dophin-friendly computing, olpc"spaleta