Robert Wright

I was watching a video about Fedora from 10 years ago, presented by Matthew Miller at FOSDEM ‘15 and I was interested in the challenges that the community faced at the time.

Fedora and Linux as distos were declining in search, the way developers interact with packaging was changing, GitHub was disrupting the world of software.

As I look to see the updated chart of how Google indexes the trends, I can see the same pattern Matthew presented in at the event, but I can also see the same decline. The same trends seem to hold true across different search terms as well for other distros.

Of our core four foundations in Fedora – First, Freedom, Features, Friends – I pause and wonder about how users are interacting with Linux of today. With the rise of open source technology over the last decade and developers coming out of college and high school with a better appriciation of working in the open – what does it mean to use a Linux distro to today’s audiences? Is community enough, or is there some sort of interesting evolution for how packaging software together and distributing it will add impact to someone’s life.

Things I start to think about from a user’s perspective when I look at this are things like:

• What does the hobby developer use for their OS? Do they have needs and wants that are not captured?
• How does Fedora and the downstreams interact and tighten the gap between Enterprise Linux and Community Linux?
• Does an experience matter more with boot and go functionality to perform a task like Remixes do or does having a strong base you add upon user by user matter more?
• With the advent of data science tools exploding into the world of AI – how do we enable the future developers to do their best work using open source OSes as their foundation?

And on the community’s end – what does Fedora bring for them? As software becomes packaged more and more by the developer in language specific package managers, how can Fedora enable packagers and community members to do what they love? And more so, how can we enable people to love what they do?

I start to think about what brought me back to Fedora – values based work. Doing something that contributes to the broader world. Maybe that’s something worth exploring and showcasing how what Fedora does builds upon being a Digital Public Good and enables the entire world to grow.

At Flock ‘24, I got to see an OLPC for the first time. It had been something I’ve read about since I was a teenager, facinated by the impact and design that a mesh-wifi enabled laptop could bring for kids around the world. I want to see things like what OLPC did using Fedora making an impact on the world. It’s just finding what that next thing might be.