From Fedora Project Wiki
Fedora Project Board Meeting :: Tuesday 2009-01-27
Roll Call
- Present: Paul Frields, Bill Nottingham, Chris Aillon, Seth Vidal, Matt Domsch, Dimitris Glezos, Chris Tyler, Spot Callaway, and Jesse Keating
- Regrets: Harald Hoyer
- Secretary: John Poelstra
Followup to Previous Business
- Last meeting: Board/Meetings/2009-01-20
Trademark Guidelines Slowing Down Community?
- Discussion was to be moved to fedora-advisory-board@redhat.com
- No discussion observed on the mailing list
- Some board members re-reviewed guidelines since the last meeting. Key points from today's discussion were:
- Fedora is trademarkable world-wide
- Trademark guidelines on the wiki seem rather long--could a summarized version be created?
- This is generally not advised as it has the potential to create a second legal document
- Handling of domain name registration (and payment) by Red Hat on behalf of Fedora groups
- Local groups can choose to register their own domains, need to sign the trademark agreement.
- Alternatively, Red Hat can handle the domain registration and ownership
- Does not require execution of trademark agreement
- Domain name points to the organization's servers
- ACTIONS: No further discussion
"What is Fedora?" Discussion
- Discussion continued from last week's minutes on fedora-advisory-board list
- https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2009-January/msg00048.html
- The board recognizes this question needs to be answered and spent a significant amount of time discussing:
- Who should answer this question and other questions it raises?
- How the questions should be answered?
- What does answering these questions mean to the Fedora Project as a whole?
- The Board explored the topic somewhat, but its complexity and importance demand further discussions
- ACTIONS Discussion will continue on 2009-02-10.
Comments and Observations (brainstorming)
- The bullets below capture the free flow of the ideas and issues raised
- The discussion represented many community concerns from varying points of view.
- The Board realizes that there are differing opinions on these issues.
- Therefore, these are not the final views or decisions of the board and should not be construed as such
- Current web page is very vague and wide-ranging: https://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview
- Enthusiast definition is very broad
- How well does this the marketing plan capture things?
- Is it the Board's job to define "What Fedora Is"?
- Is it the Fedora Project Leader's job to define Fedora and its purpose?
- What problems would the board be solving by doing this?
- How would it affect the day to day operation of Fedora?
- Could it help the focus of individual developers and what they work on or consider a priority?
- What would be the purpose of further defining Fedora?
- Is it to be able to tell more people "no we don't do that?"
- Does it intentionally or unintentionally try to answer the question of whether Fedora competes with Ubuntu or not?
- Is having a "desktop" and a "server" focus a strength or a weakness?
- Which teams are responsible and accountable for setting default applications in Fedora?
- Some are specified by individual SIGs
- FESCo?
- Some are not clearly defined?
- Would it be useful to directly address the ongoing question raised that our supported release cycle is not long enough as part of "What Fedora Is"?
- Is it worth considering extending support timeline another two or three months?
- There are no guidelines about what type of updates should be pushed and when
- History has shown that individual judgement is not always good as each maintainer uses different criteria
- By not clearly defining what users Fedora is not for it is hard to make good design decisions
- By restricting Fedora to a subset of users could we disadvantage current or unforeseen contributors?
- What is Red Hat's role in defining Fedora's purpose?
- Does the role of Fedora need to be defined?
- What guidelines are there around what Fedora cannot do?
- Not directly compete with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Distill what community is doing now and what we are good at?
- Is it better to have a concrete descriptions of what Fedora is versus vague notions of what we want to be: "We only use free and open source software"?
Status of FUDCon F11 Survey
- survey is in the process of being created by a person inside Red Hat that has access to the survey tool
- board will get a preview once created and then send out to the community
- Paul Frields is requesting that the Red Hat Community Architecture Team administer this survey at all future events
Next Meeting
- Date: 2009-02-03
- Time: 19:00 UTC
- Location: irc.freenode.net
- Moderated channel for board answers: #fedora-board-meeting
- Public channel to ask questions: #fedora-board-public