On Fri, Jan 03, 2020 at 03:13:53PM -0500, Karsten Wade wrote: Wow, five years goes fast! I'd like to raise an idea for discussion and thought, and possible further discussion between the Fedora Council and the CentOS board. [I'm posting this in both groups.] Around the same time the CentOS goals were being created, Fedora was working on plans for "Fedora.next", which included among other things Fedora Server. I won't rehash all that here, but in short: while that succeeded at some of its goals, it never really had the user adoption we'd hoped for. Of course, some of that is simply a matter of lifecycle: while a fast-moving server OS is useful in some very real cases, it's decidedly niche. When Fedora launched that plan, CentOS wasn't really in the "family", and after, we just kind of existed in parallel, with some very loose collaboration in areas like EPEL. Of course, things are different now. Therefore, I propose that in this next decade, we make that collaboration stronger. Together, we have a very nice answer to the fundamental problem of unified operating systems. That is, some parts move too fast and other parts move too slowly. Between Fedora and CentOS, we have answers to both! And, with the in-progress dist-git merge, we even have both _in the same place_. Specifically, I'd like to suggest three things. First, let's replace Fedora Server as a user-focused artifact with CentOS Stream. There's still a need for a Fedora Server as an upstream, but most users of Fedora as a server are making custom builds (or using the basic Cloud image), not using Fedora Server per se. So, I think we should stop marketing that to users, and steer people with server use cases outside of the fast-moving niche to CentOS Stream. The current story of CentOS and Fedora is pretty confusing to users, and Stream only makes it more so. Let's simplify things! Second, where there's overlap, let's look at merging Fedora and CentOS SIGs into joint bodies. We have groups like the cloud image SIGs which are basically doing the exact same thing in two different ways. Same thing with containers. We also have huge overlaps in documentation and community user support and all sorts of non-technical project areas. I'm not saying these all need to be smooshed together, but where it makes sense let's work together. This, too, brings simplification to the "what's with CentOS vs. Fedora" story: rather than making contributors pick, we can welcome all with open arms. And finally, let's really take advantage of a merged dist-git repository, and the capabilities that Modularity gives us. SIGs building things for CentOS should be able to directly reference Fedora branches where faster-moving software is useful — and people building things in Fedora should be able to pull in branches from Stream where a slower-moving version would make sense. And we could even make additional shared branches where necessary, using modularity to make optional streams which could be used in CentOS SIGs, EPEL, or a Fedora OS. What do you think? -- Matthew Miller <mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; Fedora Project Leader