Fedora's Identity

While we have members of the Fedora community underhandedly criticising each other, I thought it would be important to point out a few things on the recent discussions about Fedora and if the project has an identity crisis as a distribution.

Granted, I haven't been aboard long, but one thing has been obvious to me from the start: As benevolent as Red Hat is as a corporate sponsor, its involvement creates a big point of friction in the Fedora community. We are all working together, but there are two camps within the project. There are volunteer contributors like me (these make up the bulk of the community) and then there are people getting paid in one capacity or another by Red Hat who also work on the project. In my opinion, this dichotomy isn't as pronounced as it is over at the Ubuntu project, where Canonical takes a much more hands-on approach in the direction and governing of the community, but it is still an important factor within Fedora. Máirín's assertion that we all make Fedora is theoretically correct but practically it is as misleading as saying that the slaves have build the great pyramids — yes, they technically did, but while they died of malnutrition with bloody hands others reaped the benefits of their work. It is true that all contributors make and shape Fedora to some extent but the general direction of the project is very much set by Red Hat. Now, people at the company will dispute this, but I think we all know that it is true. Seven of the twelve members of the current Fedora Board work for Red Hat, one of them is the Project Leader and Chairman of the Board, of course. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying it's bad that Red Hat is steering Fedora to a big extent. Red Hat is a great company and I strongly believe they are one of the good guys plus they also sponsor the project and keep it going. Getting control in return for that only seems fair to me, but in order to have a healthy relationship within the community we all have to admit that this is the case. What worries me is a tendency to pronounce our Red Hat colleagues as "people just like us" when in fact, they often have a lot more insight into the project and what's going on, if only by the virtue of the fact that they work in the same building as all the other movers and shakers in Fedora Land. Having said that, it surely helps that the current FPL wasn't working at Red Hat before he took the role and is even now working from home.

It often feels to me that the community contributors are pulling Fedora in one direction and Red Hat is pulling it in another. This is to be expected of course and it isn't the whole story as there also seem to be divisions within what Red Hat wants to do with the project (consider Lennart Poettering trying to introduce a cutting-edge init system that could potentially break everything for everyone while on the other hand people like Máirín have a goal of making Fedora stable and usable for everyone who just wants to get into Linux). A lot of these ideas just don't mesh and saying that they do will not make it so. I strongly believe we have to decide where we want to go: Do we want to be a power user, freedom-focused distro for developers that gives everyone access to the newest tools immediately or do we want to be the most stable, end-user friendly distro we can be and beat Ubuntu at their own game? I don't believe being both is possible, even for something as awesome as a completely community-developed Linux distro. If we try to be both, we will fail at both and end up being even more mediocre than some people already see us as. Of course, a mission statement that says our target audience is "everyone who voluntarily switches to Linux, preferably contributors" doesn't help in deciding this. Based on that, we are trying to be the better Ubuntu and I don't believe Freedom and Features First fit into that. Not to mention that the "let's do a better Ubuntu"-space is pretty occupied by Mint, which to be honest, is pretty hard to beat where it's at.

I believe Fedora needs to find it's place in the distro world. I also believe the dev-centric, power user space is one where we can kick ass and do what Red Hat wants us to do to further it's goals. But whatever we do, we need to re-define our target audience. Target audience means you can't be afraid to exclude people. To have a useful target audience, you need to exclude people. All the best brands and products have a clearly defined set of people they are targeted at and especially when you have strong principles like software freedom, you can't target everyone. We need to be realistic about this or we will fail and become obscure and unimportant.

If you have comments about this post, please share them in this identi.ca conversation. I am very interested in discussing this topic.