James Wilkinson wrote:
James, reading your message prompted me to remember a quotation I read the other day that was attributed to Harry Truman, "The only thing new in this world, is the history you did not know." Because I am a little familiar with at least part of the historical record that may touch on Red Hat's decision,I've been wondering for most of the day how to put this, but I'm disappointed in the Fedora leadership.
Not so much for the decision (although I maintain it was a bad one), as for the way in which it was made.
SNIP
You know? "Community"? The words that the project website keeps using?
Let me tell you: "community" means "communication". It means
"consultation". It means at *least* an attempt to come to a consensus.
Especially on issues that change the status of that community.
Communication has only been one way. There has been no attempt at
consultation: no attempt at consensus.
I thoroughly disagree with the notion that the decision to adopt Fedoraforum.org as a vehicle was unilateral or done without consultation.
There was a rather extensive discussion several weeks back of the desirability of moving to a web interface for endusers. I found it an appalling idea at the time as list exchanges suggested to me that those subscribers possessing the technical skills to really help out endusers would be unlikely to populate the web interface subscriber group. I was also concerned by the general tone from many of the thread participants that endusers were really not welcome on fedora-list.
I strongly suspect that the number of endusers moving to linux is increasing at an increasing rate. With that in mind, I see the move by Red Hat to adopt fedoraforum.org as an official forum/vehicle as a concrete commitment of resources to further development of the linux desktop market and platform consistent with continuing support of its historical technically competent, sys-admin type user community. They are apparently willing to provide the bandwidth necessary to support both the webforum and the mailing lists. I see nothing to suggest that mailing lists sponsored by Red Hat have been deprecated in any way.
The ways that have served Fedora well for technical decisions Will NotI too have been considering a change to an alternative linux. Fedora Core development schedules are simply too fast for many endusers. The primary reason I have stuck with Red Hat as long as I have is because it has been relatively easy to do so and there was little to nothing to gain from switching. But, the vague impressions I have about FC4 are not particularly attractive to me as an unsophisticated, technical neophyte enduser.
Do when it comes to a major change to the status of a community. It
would be charitable to call what happened an oversight, or that the
people concerned don't have spare time to consult widely. But it looks
from here like supreme indifference to our opinions and our
contributions, veering towards contempt.
As a result, I'm seriously wondering what on earth I am doing here. There are other Linux communities: there are other OSes. I have probably been using Red Hat and Fedora as my main distribution for too long.
I am seriously considering switching distributions. (Any recommendations for AMD-64? I understand there's a new Ubuntu out tomorrow).
I'd like to hear what you all feel about this. I'll remain subscribed to the list for a while, but I doubt I'll contribute much in future.
Thank you all for what you've done. Thank you, Red Hat and the Fedora community, for all your technical achievements.
God bless, and God speed,
James.
