From Fedora Project Wiki

Background

Karsten 'quaid' Wade gave a keynote at Southern California Linux Expo 8x in January 2010. The talk was called Being a Catalyst in Communities - the Scientific Facts About the Open Source Way. The talk discussed lessons learned from open source product launches. Two projects were cited as being less popular upon launch: 1. Fedora and 2. SELinux. While Fedora has impressive market share growth, SELinux continues to have a less than popular public opinion. Someone from the audience said, "you have a marketing problem," when it comes to SeLinux. We agree.

Later that year, Dan Walsh gave several talks at SouthEast LinuxFest on SeLinux (when klaatu uploads the videos to archive.org , we will link here.) There he theorized that because the SELinux "disable rate" was high on Red Hat Enterprise Linux products but not on the Fedora product, SELinux's unpopularity issues persist in the system administrator community.

Myths

Let us seek to understand the reasons why system administrators choose not to use SELinux. Here are a few misconceptions we have heard. This is in no particular order. It would be interesting to do interviews of system administrators or online polling to see what is out there and what is prevalent.

1. SELinux is a Red Hat/Fedora specific product.

2. SELinux is not Free Software.

3. No good documentation exists for SELinux.

4. SELinux is at least as complicated, if not more complicated, as it was x years ago.

5. SELinux is only for customers in the United States government.

6. If I do not turn off SELinux then I will be blocked out of my own system.

7. I run several virtual machines but I think SELinux is overkill for securing my hyper-visor.

8. SELinux does not have a GUI... even if it does, it will not be powerful.

Audiences

This is where we can reach people who may have a better opinion of SELinux if open communication.

Mediums

Documentation

Education is a critical key to the success of this campaign. Here we will list documents that we may end up quoting in an article, brochure, or poster.

Good Free Docs

SELinux notebook

Not Free

While these docs provide good information on SELinux, we can not quote them in marketing materials due to licensing issues. Maybe the copyright holders will work with us if we ask nice enough.