new to list, first post

[David Nalley]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:30 AM, <wdepli at mikrotec.com> wrote:
> I am new to this list, and I am looking forward to hearing the discussion.
>
> But thanks to bob and others responding to my post on fedoraforum.org
> http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=227101 , I think I would
> like to broach a subject.  My apologies if this is already a burning issue
> -- I am at work, and should not spend time browsing the archives.
>
> Is Fedora really gaining that much ground with every bi-yearly release to
> justify that pace?
>
> After all Red Hat is not a desktop but a server, right?  And Chrome could
> kill current races to find a desktop to compete with Windows.  So why not
> concentrate on what Red Hat/Fedora does best?  Let Ubuntu grind out Gnome
> and KDE enhancements.  How often does Solaris release desktop distros?
>
> Thanks again for letting me be a party to the discussion.
>
> D_bot


Welcome to the list.

So the question that jumps out of me, is what arena are you measure
the ground gained in?

There are clearly some things that Fedora cares about, but doesn't
necessarily prioritize, and in many of those areas, we probably gain
little ground, and perhaps even lose ground because of our priorities.

Fedora's priority is to be a place of innovation, to be the best of
openource right now, and those priorities require rapid releases. The
pace is gruelling, and how some of the members of the community keep
up remains a mystery to me. (I fully expect to discover that Jesse is
really a set of triplets committed to Fedora)

Also, please note, that Red Hat != Fedora - though Red Hat certainly
has an interest in Fedora and Fedora is the upstream for RHEL; much
like kernel.org is the upstream for Fedora's and Ubuntu's kernel.

I think you'll find that there is really far more innovation that
occurs here (yes desktop innovation too) than elsewhere, not to
diminish the work of others, but between the huge community and the
dedicated engineers from RH that are working with upstream projects
like Gnome, most features appear here first (because we closely track
upstream, and becase many of those features, like NetworkManager, are
largely written by people in Fedora)

Now - all of that said - what kind of work in Fedora can we get you involved in?