I'm in the middle of a week of training and this deserves more than a quick comment, but it also deserves more than the no comment I've given it for a couple months. So more on this later. For now, please take a look at this message summarizing our 2017 work, and this update from 2018.

I've been thinking about your comments here and in my talk at Flock I noted that we're still missing something important. I pretty strongly believe that narrowing the mission to something actionable was the right thing — if "promoting FOSS" is the mission, "building the OS" is probably the 9999th thing on the effective things to do right now in the world. But pragmatically, building the OS is what we do, so that gap needed to be closed.

Software freedom — free and open source software — is vital to Fedora, and the intention was never to squeeze that out. That's why we decided to present the mission in context with the Foundations, of which Freedom remains first.

But, we also decided at 2017 to not worry about a vision statement, and last year we focused more in the pragmatic/action direction with a strategic plan. But taking what you're saying here to heart, this year we're focusing on that vision. We want to state our ideal open and free world clearly and up front, while the mission defines our approach to getting there.

@ankursinha you are an angel for being so patient about this. I think the vision statement, when finalized, will give us a better context for having this discussion. I've committed @mattdm to publishing the second draft on the 24th of this month, so we'll come back to it after that.

I think we're in general agreement about the idea, it's just a matter of finding the right expression.

Discussed in Council Face-to-Face (F2F) on 2020-11-09.

We didn't really discuss this ticket today, but it is coming up on the next Council F2F session (which are staggered across November, so we don't fall over from 6 hours of Zooming). But I think we will come to a close on this ticket before 2020 is out. :wink:

@bookwar brought up a conversation topic loosely about "why work/package upstream in Fedora?" Many of the points covered can fit into this ticket. We took some notes for a placeholder for next week's discussion on this ticket.

Also, I am interested in using this ticket as an opportunity for addressing some of the tech debt in how the Council docs are published (i.e. modules). I think it will facilitate an easier time of how we capture content like this page in the Council docs site. I can rep/own this when we get to the topic in the F2F.

@ankursinha If you have time to review, I put together a presentation recently that was more or less an explanation to a software vendor "why is it worth packaging your Open Source work in a Linux distro like Fedora?"

I am curious if you, or any other Council/Community member, think we should capture any of these points on a docs page somewhere:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SRTRBILg3JKugK18sdtG9iUONLTH-foQEZGhoAmYDU4/edit?usp=sharing

@jflory7 : thanks, the ppt is great! We use similar points when we present NeuroFedora to users.

I don't know if we need to include points focusing on packaging in the general docs, though. I can't think of either pros or cons at the moment somehow.

I feel focusing too much on packaging makes it harder to attract new contributors---since people without prior software development experience feel it isn't the right place for them etc. Got no data to back that up, though. I try to get people in first, and then help them learn packaging if that's what they wish to do. (That's also what the Fedora Join process is based on---meet the people first, become part of the community, and then find stuff to do).

I think I'm going to close this in favor of the general Website Refresh project. That design should provide both a better place for and better content for what's wanted here.