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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

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:
    1. Who should answer this question and other questions it raises?
    2. How the questions should be answered?
    3. 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