On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, James Olin Oden wrote:
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Dag Wieers dag@centos.org wrote:
On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, James Olin Oden wrote:
CentOS does not have customers,
Yes you do. Not paying, but you have those you serve. Now you serve them at your pleasure, but serve them you do (and quite well I might add). My comments though were not directed at CentOS. You literally inherit what RedHat gives you. You can make it better but typically your goals seem to be to stay as close to the original as possible (which is a good goal).
I wouldn't call it customers. And we don't have employees either. :)
We have users, and some of them are volunteers and that is the first thing to understand a project like CentOS. What is driving the project is a combination of self-interest and recognition of those volunteers.
Any user can become a volunteer given some rules and some skills. Although currently that does not always scale that well and we are looking for ways to improve this and empower people to take action too.
As a project we need to regularly do a self-assessement and better define who we are, what our goals are and how we want to reach those. And communicate this clearly to get all heads in the same direction.
If you look at the past year we have made a lot of progress in some areas but we fell short on other domains. And I think we have seen the limits of working with volunteers a few times too.
We have to learn from what we did wrong, and find spots to improve, but most of all we have to manage the resources we have better so that we can put trust in the people that dedicate their time for free and plan ahead.
Anyway I am getting off-topic now.
Customers seems to imply we have an incentive/obligation to support/help, and I am afraid we do not. Neither the project nor the community has any obligations, nevertheless people are being helped. We have users and we are users.