RH and FC commmunity relations

[Varkk]

Just saw this on slashdot and thought it would be psted here already. What is everyone else's thoughts on the RH-Fedora community relation?

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00104.html


(Also how come IRC chatlogs have become the new comedy medium?)

[Ug]

I haven't had a chance to read it as of yet. But I will later. ;)

[Ug]

That thing is too damn true. I find the detachment between "them" (Red Hat and those other Fedora people) and "us" very frustrating. There is no real way in which we can all interact. The Fedora Website (http://fedora.redhat.com/) is next to useless for example. It could be so much more.

Surely we deserve better interactions?

[fjleal]

Like someone wrote: FC1 == RH10

[ewdi]

i would say Fedora is an important part of redhat, the reason why it is because redhat needed a full fledge test bed for their RHEL product using fedora as the bait to do so without paying much money to do internal testing, and the name fedora will nto harm RHEL product name line up if it messed up

[foolish]

Unfortunately we aren't included the way we could be. Personally I think the first thing we need to be a real project is Fedora-Extras. We need Fedora-Extras, and we need it now!

Not only will Fedora Extras solve the problem of finding additional software, fedoratracker.org does a nice job I know, but we need -Extras.

It's bad enough that the distro developers and the community still is separated, what I think is worse is that the community itself is separated. If we work on getting ourselves unified and powerful, we can rule the world of men. Really, we can.

Fedoraforum.org has come a long way, I haven't seen any stats, but I'm sure there are several hundred posts here each day. We have thousands of users and people get good answers quickly. We all love this forum.

We have the good f.a.q. that could be great. I say we get our heads together and start working in getting the f.a.q. up like we (thats me) want it to be. See my other thread on this. I want to do something, I have all the time I need on my hands now and making the f.a.q. dynamical and great is something I can do, if I get some help by someone who actually knows what they are doing.

Fedoranews offers a great service, but it's to messy. I've sent a long mail to them some time ago, explaining how I would like to see it work, but I haven't gotten any reply. Fedoranews need to be more structured, and it really needs a clear idea of what the site really is supposed to be, right now it kind of does everything from newsletter, package update notifying to documentation.

There are several other fedora community sites out there, working hard to keep themselves busy while waiting for the Fedora project to get started. FedoraChat, FedoraDocs.net and so on. Most are great initiatives, but we're reinventing the wheel over and over here. Unite!

When talking about reinventing the wheel one can't fail to mention the packagers. Everyone from the legendary freshrpms to the little known Dries are doing a great job, providing us with packages for almost everything. Yet again we stumble over our keyword: Unite!

We don't need another repository, we don't need more package management solutions, we don't need more! We need what we have to unite. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be possible without Fedora-Extras. And Fedora-Extras won't happen "over night" you now. ("It's been a year!")

But from talking to doing. I want to get something done. Please, let us know what you are doing, or planning, Put your ideas for community projects out here and let people who have similar ideas help you. This may be what fedorausers.org can do. Let people who have an idea of something nice make their ideas available to the publics so that we can get something done, together.

Let's try to create a community without the help of Red Hat, and let them join in when they please.

[Ug]

I'm too tired to post anything more constructive (but trust me I will do shortly) so all I'm going to say is "mmm". And that I agree with Foolish.

[ewdi]

yeah, replication of what already out there is not what we need right now, i have to be honest, we all need to take a step to try to get everyone involves.

Let's ask others if they would help fedoraforum as a support forum and we will give away fedorausers.org as project hosting services.

taking about project hosting services, foolish check your PM, i forgot to send it to you

[Jman]

That "chatlog" is hilarious but all too true. There is lot of confusion between the seperate groups involved.

This is even more community involved than Red Hat Linux was before. An overall change will have to come from the community as a whole, like any open source project. Red Hat is just the sponsoring organization who organizes it, distributes it, and makes it look pretty. Getting a community organized on something this big is hard.

IRC is appropriate because it too can be very confusing at times. Plus it's completely random and crazy. For more fun chatlogs see http://www.bash.org/ *WARNING* offensive content

[Prometheus]

it just feels like there is still a big separation between us (users and enthusiasts) and the developers. Sure, we can tweak stuff and ask for changes, but it still kinda feels like we are the little guys. Thats how i feel atleast.

And I agree with Ug, ""mmm". And that I agree with Foolish."

[mark]

The thing that amazes me about the Fedora community is the level of passion exhibited - I mean, you just don't see Windows users getting this worked-up about their OS!

While I agree with most of Foolish's post, I would be wary of too monolithic an approach. Sure, improve communcations between the various community sites - but if you try to become "all things to all people", there's the risk that you wind up doing too many things, none of them very well.

That being said, I'd like to offer whatever help I can to the community, probably through this forum. I don't do code (see signature) but I do have some documentation experience - and I've done a LOT of testing over the years. Unfortunately, I work on average 55-60 hours a week, so it would definitely be on a "hobby" basis for me. Given that, if anyone has a suggestion for a project, I'd be more than happy to do what I can.

Any thoughts?

[crackers]

Originally posted by mark
I mean, you just don't see Windows users getting this worked-up about their OS!

Oh, yeah? Tell one of them that their OS is a piece of virus-ridden, security-hole generating, bloated crud and see what happens... :D

Actually, where you see the passion is in a self-selected subset of actual users. Of course you see passion on Fedora-related sites! It's the folks who are genuinely interested in it that participate. The others, like my wife, only want it to work well enough to do what they want to do. They don't give a rat's ass about the hows and whys...

[Ug]

Originally posted by mark
That being said, I'd like to offer whatever help I can to the community, probably through this forum. I don't do code (see signature) but I do have some documentation experience - and I've done a LOT of testing over the years. Unfortunately, I work on average 55-60 hours a week, so it would definitely be on a "hobby" basis for me. Given that, if anyone has a suggestion for a project, I'd be more than happy to do what I can.

Any thoughts? Well you could hang around here and help out the little people. Or you could contribute to FedoraNEWS (http://www.fedoranews.org) or sign yourself up for one of the official Fedora Documentation (http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/) bits.

[Varkk]

My way of helping is to hang around here and offer help where I can in additon to helping friends out. I also have filed a bug report at the fedora bugzilla for FC2T2.

[fjleal]

crackers wrote:
The others, like my wife, only want it to work well enough to do what they want to do. They don't give a rat's ass about the hows and whys..
The joys of marriage... How I do understand you... :rolleyes: ;)

[Ug]

*suddenly feels very young*

[crackers]

Originally posted by fjleal
The joys of marriage... How I do understand you...

Actually, my wife is very astute. She got tired (over a year ago) of TurboTax baby-stepping her way through a tax return, tired of the constant reboots and other associated Windows plagues and told me to "get this Micro**** crap off my machine." She's been using RH/Fedora/KDE ever since and has been deliriously happy with the switch. She even got all pouty when I upgraded her kernel and had to reboot: "But that will ruin my uptime!" :D

[Jman]

* agrees with Ug *

It seems that if you want to help but can't help out the developers directly by coding or writing documentation, you become a part of the community. Help others. Promote the software. Make a market for the developers to develop for. If you can't help directly create a positive environment.

In any case this situation gives the user more control than proprietary products.

[Prometheus]

Yeah, i agree with that. It feels like there are so many tiers of fedora users with their differing levels of understanding and working with the OS. Sometimes i still get overwhelmed with it all and have to boot to windows to realize where i came from and y. Its wierd that with Linux you can know so much, but there always seems more to know. Frustrating sometimes, but hey, thats half the fun.

[cathal]

The great thing about Linux not only Fedora or Red Hat is that anyone and i mean anyone can contribute to the community, and thats something the newbies sometimes dont understand. You dont have to be a programmer, great at writing documentation. Just maybe reply to a post for instance on this forum of a problem that you encountered and solved or even install Fedora :D on the computer next door.

I agree the whole community based idea that red hat has hasn't really happened yet for me anyway. I see to much widespread of ideas and solutions. Everyone trying to do everything rather than to unite and everyone take a piece of the cake. And if we want to do anything with Fedora it has to be ok with the guys at red hat first which i dont get. Id rather see a community and red hat based team together which puts fedora in the right direction.

[Impeteperry]

Gentlemen, I'm pushing 80, have been around computers since the early 1970s so I think I might add a bit to this discussion.

Fedora, is very exciting. The combination of the Big Company for stability, and the individual dynamics of people like you all , give Fedora somthing I found so lacking when I was messing around with Debian.

There is no question in my mind that Fedora will be the distro of the future.

As far as this forum goes, I have had (am having) some problems with installing FC2, (as I seem to have with what ever I do), but the help here is great. (I finnally got my sound card up).

I'm not sure what this "unity" thing is, but if you all keep doing what you are doing, you can't fail.

pete

[fjleal]

Thanks, Pete, for your words of wisdom! It's nice to read some optimistic opinions for a change. I hope you're right... ;)

[sailor]

My wife wants me off my computer pernamently...spend too much time playing with FC2..:(
fjleal commented that FC1 == RH10...I think this is the key
It would make sense for Redhat to distance itself...why would anyone want to buy their product when they can use FC1 or FC2? I would think that it is in their best interest to point to Fedora Project as "testing only" or "not as stable" or "inferior product" I am also sure that they have information that we could use but are not giving it up...they take but they are not giving back...
It would be nice if there was a better/more organized communication between
RH, developers, forums and testers...but I don't see it happening...

Without the FedoraForum I would never have stayed with Fedora...you guys are the best resource resource/support center I have found ever!

sailor

[zulaica]

i completely agree with foolish. fragmentation in this community alone is it's downfall (and don't even get me started in linux distribution as a whole! ;) ).

the problem i see most with regards to fragmentation is ego. everyone wants to be "the person that started *x*" or "the person that 'invented' *x* (which is really just a fork)". it seems that no one out there wants to be "the person that contributed to *x*". that's unfortunate. it loses sight of the open-source spirit.

[Ug]

Once my exams finish in a few weeks, I want to see if I can start working on some better community relations between us and other sources. I think its vital, I also want to start contributing more stuff to the FedoraFAQ.