I have zero evidence in front of me that users are being driven away from Fedora because of AI. If you want to bring that language into discussion, please show me the metrics. I’m looking around at the distribution space.. and I’m not seeing distributions being punished by providing a coherent AI developer desktop environment. We have to take care in how we as a project uses AI yes.. but providing AI desktop to developers.. the only controversial part of that is the NV hardware enablement.
I strongly disagree.
Fedora is supposed to be out in front in the conversations… even the controversial things. We aren’t going to have influence in the conversation if we aren’t in them. What we are talking about here is a desktop environment aimed at developers, that is well within scope of Fedora’s target use case, in fact its probably Fedora’s primary use case. The only technically interesting part of this is the NV hardware enablement (which may end up being a remix regardless of user focus). Gaining philosophical distance in the space of developer desktops is how Fedora becomes irrelevant… because like it or not… the people starting their software develepment journey right now are using these tools. You’re worried about turning away existing contributors because we are making a space for new outputs. I’m desperately worried about being compelling enough to attract the type of person I was when I committed to contributing my volunteer time to this project 20+ years ago. I keep asking myself If I were 20 years old again… right now in this moment..and I was going to pick a linux desktop as my daily driver… would I pick Fedora? Would having an AI desktop offering to try inside Fedora matter? I can’t honestly say it would not.
I’m going to put my FPL hat on real tight for this next comment.
I’m not here to side-step problems. I’m here to lean into them and get to a better future. I think some people are generally concerned about the ethical use of AI and are loudly pushing back on a future they feel is coming for them that is outside of their control. Saying no to everything AI related in the places where they have agency to do so feels like a way to take a stand and take back control. I think that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
I am genuinely concerned about the ethical use of AI. I am genuinely concerned about the hype bubble. But i don’t think this technology goes away, even after the bubble burst. The best possible fiuture I can see involves the Fedora community being part of the conversation around ethical use of this technology and that doesn’t mean we sit on the sidelines and ask downstreams to do the work we refuse to do to provide a developer oriented desktop experience because we can’t bring outselves to do it. Punting on developers is how this project becomes irrelevant. And its definitely not in line with the supporting text of the First foundation, nor inline with what I understand Fedora’s core mission to be.
The people who are going to get us to the better AI future are the people at the start of their journey and see value in the technology and Fedora needs to be influencing those people so they take the technology into an ethical direction that is most congruent with our shared ideals. The skeptics among us, myself included, aren’t the people with the ability to drag the best future out of the darkness. We at best are safeguarding the past and the present from the worst possible future. But that’s not enough. We have to make a space to be in conversation with the people who can get us to the best possible future, we have to give those people a chance to build and fail and build again, dragging the best achievable future forward. One of the leat risky ways we do that is by providing a space to build a self-sustaining developer desktop experience that they can contribute to inside the bounds of our project space and that puts us in conversation with the people who see value where we can’t and we can get to make progress towards the best possible future available to all of us.
You personally don’t have to agree to the goal of this output. This output will be successful or not based entirely on whether it attracts enough people to be long term sustainable. That doesn’t have to be you or anyone in particular. There is value in constructive skeptics that influence the direction, not by applying stop energy, but by challenging those who are attracted to contribute to make progress on the shared ethical concerns. By working on the underpinning technology for other outputs inside the bounds of the same project, you gain trust and have cultural influence in a way that you would otherwise not. And that will matter in the long term.
As the Fedora Project Leader, I am absolutely not concerned about the reputational damage to this project that comes with setting up an entirely new output attractive to developers who want to make use of Ai tools. If this were proposing re-orienting Workstation, which is a mature project output, I would be pushing back as well as a skeptic on the value of the AI stuff. That approach would be materially changing the character of an existing output that users rely on..and that’s probably not appropriate and would result in watching users drop out. This approach deliberately sets up a separate output to avoid that. This will either be attractive and grow or it will not.. based entirely on individual interest. This approach is not disruptive to existing outputs nor asking for users or volunteer contributors relying on those outputs to be coopted into putting work into an output that do not want to contribute to.