I popped the question back in July on FAB about Fedora's Target market (https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2007-July/msg00137.html) Since then I've seen some interesting theories about it. Combined with a bit more thinking and off-line discussions I've come up with my own theory. Part prediction and part wishful thinking, I hope others will agree.
Fedora has always been a prime breeding ground for innovation, this will continue. Fedora will become known among coders, hackers, and scholars as the OS of choice for their works.
Coders will see a few developer specific features added in the form of custom re-spins and new tools for more integrated ways of collaborating. They will find new ways to work with each other far outside of email. Fedora as an operating system will slowly become a gateway into online collaboration and into Fedora (and other OSS) contribution. I count roughly 25 source control repos being shared on fedorapeople.org already (launched just 2 months ago). Most people don't even know that git, hg, bzr, svn and cvs are installed on the box.
Hackers will be very compelled to use Fedora for it's re-spin and architecture support. dgilmore, spot and company have been hard at work to bring secondary architectures online. I predict people will see Fedora making its way onto a wide variety of exotic hardware. Secondary architecture support isn't even completed yet and there is already confirmed interest from people wanting to build Fedora for arm, ia64, sparc, s390, and alpha. This isn't people wanting Fedora for those archs, these are people wanting and willing to build it themselves. Hackers will start re-spinning their own official and non official Fedora spins including custom builds like Mythdora (Mythtv version of Fedora) and other builds that I can't even imagine right now. I predict people will be installing Fedora onto their favorite $GAMECONSOLE as well as more embedded devices like their linksys router and toaster. Why? Because we've made our process as transparent as possible and the tools we use encourage it, making it easy.
Scholars will continue to look to Fedora as a completely free operating system where brand new technologies are always available. OLPC will prove a poster child in how to customize Fedora for specific use in education. I'm confident Fedora will make its way into the classrooms it just needs a leader who's willing do the work to talk to universities to get it done (this may be closer then I know :). Scholarly technophiles will learn to look to Fedora to see what most operating systems will be like in two years. They, and others, will join Fedora making us better because they realize that as a user who's willing to contribute,they not only have a stake in the outcome of a release but can ensure that they've help make Fedora all it can be.
Further Predictions:
1) Fedora will become extremely popular in non-english speaking places. http://translate.fedoraproject.org/ will see to this.
2) In the near future speaking English will not be a requirement to join Fedora (I'm going to personally try to see to this)
3) Someone will yet again see the value in basing another enterprise version of their software off of Fedora :)
4) Fedora will be even more available in other countries. Very soon we're getting our first Chinese mirror!
5) Integration, collaboration and just being online will be easier than ever
6) Fedora as a community will grow at a faster rate then Fedora as an operating system from where it is right now.
6) Ubuntu will be called the new Windows. Fedora will be called the new Linux and I can't wait.
Fedora has always been a prime breeding ground for innovation, this will continue. Fedora will become known among coders, hackers, and scholars as the OS of choice for their works.
Coders will see a few developer specific features added in the form of custom re-spins and new tools for more integrated ways of collaborating. They will find new ways to work with each other far outside of email. Fedora as an operating system will slowly become a gateway into online collaboration and into Fedora (and other OSS) contribution. I count roughly 25 source control repos being shared on fedorapeople.org already (launched just 2 months ago). Most people don't even know that git, hg, bzr, svn and cvs are installed on the box.
Hackers will be very compelled to use Fedora for it's re-spin and architecture support. dgilmore, spot and company have been hard at work to bring secondary architectures online. I predict people will see Fedora making its way onto a wide variety of exotic hardware. Secondary architecture support isn't even completed yet and there is already confirmed interest from people wanting to build Fedora for arm, ia64, sparc, s390, and alpha. This isn't people wanting Fedora for those archs, these are people wanting and willing to build it themselves. Hackers will start re-spinning their own official and non official Fedora spins including custom builds like Mythdora (Mythtv version of Fedora) and other builds that I can't even imagine right now. I predict people will be installing Fedora onto their favorite $GAMECONSOLE as well as more embedded devices like their linksys router and toaster. Why? Because we've made our process as transparent as possible and the tools we use encourage it, making it easy.
Scholars will continue to look to Fedora as a completely free operating system where brand new technologies are always available. OLPC will prove a poster child in how to customize Fedora for specific use in education. I'm confident Fedora will make its way into the classrooms it just needs a leader who's willing do the work to talk to universities to get it done (this may be closer then I know :). Scholarly technophiles will learn to look to Fedora to see what most operating systems will be like in two years. They, and others, will join Fedora making us better because they realize that as a user who's willing to contribute,they not only have a stake in the outcome of a release but can ensure that they've help make Fedora all it can be.
Further Predictions:
1) Fedora will become extremely popular in non-english speaking places. http://translate.fedoraproject.org/ will see to this.
2) In the near future speaking English will not be a requirement to join Fedora (I'm going to personally try to see to this)
3) Someone will yet again see the value in basing another enterprise version of their software off of Fedora :)
4) Fedora will be even more available in other countries. Very soon we're getting our first Chinese mirror!
5) Integration, collaboration and just being online will be easier than ever
6) Fedora as a community will grow at a faster rate then Fedora as an operating system from where it is right now.
6) Ubuntu will be called the new Windows. Fedora will be called the new Linux and I can't wait.
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Comments
Ubuntu happens to fulfil those particular requirements quite well, and is probably the reason why (using an unscientific straw poll) Ubuntu and Kubuntu appeared to be the most widely used distributions by Gnome and KDE hackers at their respective conferences this year. Plain Debian also scores well by virtue of the amount of software available.
You mentioned better collaboration as a benefit. Given the most popular tools are currently email, IRC and web-based tools such as Tracker, Bugzilla, Launchpad, Wikis etc. what can Fedora offer that other Linux distributions will not?
You mentioned custom re-spins. That might be useful for creating CDs for demos or for install on specialized hardware, but I do not see that as a reason for the majority of developers to use Fedora on their own machines. Live demo CDs etc. will probably be quite useful at events and so on, but the ability to get packages of bleeding edge or just-released stable versions of software out to users quickly is of much more importance as that facilitates testing by a wider user base. SuSE's Build Service and 'One click install' button for software from the build service is much more interesting.
An important aspect of helping keen users test new releases is to allow them to have the bleeding edge software and the stable version installed and running at the same time for comparison and safety (in case the new one has bugs which prevent them from working) or to mix and match between stable and unstable components from a software suite (obviously assuming ABI compatibility exists between the two). I do not know of a distribution which really makes this easy, but it would be very, very helpful.
In summary, targeting Fedora at developers sounds like a plan, but I am not convinced that the features you highlighted are of that much interest to us.
By contrast hosted.fedoraproject.org has a full review and removal plan for stale projects. Additionally some of our newer tools (our VoIP server comes to mind) and future plans (like an account system will full OpenID support) will make collaborative tools work better. Once this base infrastructure is in place I'm confident more tools that we haven't even thought about yet will be here.
Also developers have always been geeks and early adopters. They will always want to try new fun things which is why I made my comparison between Ubuntu and windows. Ubuntu has committed to making their OS usable, they've included some questionable bits into their OS in the form of binary drivers and some other non-free code. They will find themselves tied to these drivers at the mercy of those that write them, unable to upgrade to new kernels and new software until those non-free bits get upgraded. They have also made changes to a lot of software in order to get it to work the way they want. But strangely many of these changes have not made it to the upstream projects or back into Debian (sure, you can find some examples where they have, but I can find more where they haven't) They can't maintain this fork forever like they have. And thus.... the new windows. It will continue to work but at the cost of being stale.
Fedora takes a very different attitude in that we always prefer to work with upstream on projects. Take a look at all the bits in ubuntu that were written by @redhat.com and @fedoraproject.org people. Then install fedora and see how many were written by @ubuntu.com
What your comments suggest to me is that if you use guesswork to try and figure out what a certain target audience is interested in (eg. developers) and what might persuade them to switch, you are going to get it wrong. In my opinion, your comments about what developers want from their own desktop OS are way off the mark.
If Fedora can agree on a target audience and goals that would be a good thing, and I think this is a notable component in the success of a certain distribution. But please, once you know which users you want target, find them and ask them about their needs. Don't speculate.
Yes, fedora will develop, but ubuntu will rule anyway.
And how can you call ubuntu the new windows if ubuntu and fedora use the same linux kernel. Even more, fedora runs no faster then ubuntu and fedora is mostly a testing platform for red hat. So why call ubuntu widows? because ubuntu is a bit easier to use than fedora? because it's more popular than fedora? or because you just don't like ubuntu without any "true" argument against it?
Ubuntu/Canonical has made no deals with Micro$oft and doesn't even think about it. You are definitely misinformed.
Like I said...no true argument against ubuntu...ubuntu has nothing to do with microsoft, nothing like novell, Linspire or Xandros do. Ubuntu is as free as fedora and it doesn't provide closed source codecs just like fedora. Both are binary distributions. The main difference I see is that Fedora is backed up by Red Hat and Ubuntu is backed by Canonical.
The yum point. Yum just sucks(imho). It is too slow. And it is all the way around. In ubuntu (or any other debian based distro) you never have trouble with dependencies and browsing such sites as prm.pbone.net like crazy for unsolved dependencies like you do in fedora (or other rpm based distro). That is a fact recognize even by people who choose Red Hat. Upgrade is smooth in ubuntu. I upgraded (using aptitude) without no fuss from 6.06 to 6.10 and then to 7.04..and soon to 7.10.
Ubuntu is improving hardware compatibility too. I had a case when ubuntu would recognize the printer out of box, while fedora didn't.
I also don't like Micro$oft. And if ubuntu makes a similar deal with them(like novell, linspire, xandros) I'll switch back to debian.
But you miss just one point. Linspire is an independent company...it chooses the distribution to be based of. Before it was based on debian and than it chose to be based on ubuntu, but it could have chosen to be based on fedora! so what then? would you stop using fedora just because Linspire chose to be based on fedora and made a deal with micro$oft?
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