This is a good goal. I’m not particularly interested in Fedora taking over the Linux market (or the entire OS market). I’d rather reach a subset of users and serve them well than to saturate the market and serve it poorly. (A false dichotomy, yes, but let me have this.)
If we can grow our contributor base, a growth in usage seems like a natural result. So how do we do that? No idea!
That’s a lie. I have some ideas:
- Active contributor recruitment efforts. The Join SIG does an amazing job of helping new contributors get settled in. But we’re not doing enough to go out and recruit people to join. In particular, people from under-indexed groups.
- Third-party use cases. Ubuntu has done really well being the default OS used in CI systems, public cloud, third-party app instructions, etc. What would it look like if we became the default OS that people use when they demo their apps? How do we get there?
- Improved contributor tooling. Can we reduce the friction of making contributions by wrapping docs tooling? Improving the package maintainer experience? Automating more tests?
- Make our ostree-based variants the primary deliverable. Reprovisionable[1] OSes aren’t for everyone, but if we can make the experience smooth, I think they’re a better fit for the default use case. What if we could make Silverblue be what you get when you download Fedora Workstation? FCOS be Fedora Server?
- Add mentoring programs. We have Outreachy, GSOC, etc. But what about people who come from outside of those programs? What about people who have been active for a while and want to become more active or learn new areas?
I’m not particularly tied to any of these ideas, but I think they’re important in support of the broader goal. And they largely represent areas that we’re under-investing in right now. I’m not sure how we make bigger investments in those areas, but identifying them as key parts of our 2025 plan is a starting point to figuring that out.