Stories and camels

On reading Michael Dehaan's post about Oasis's.. I realized that it answered my questions about Fedora in a very fundamental way. By story. Humans are not rational creatures.. we assume that we are but in the end we are driven by deep urges and feelings that make rational or logical decisions hard. As a friend of mine once said "The conscious is a tool to make stories about why the unconscious did things." or something like that...

Deep down inside most of us (I do not assume everyone is this way (not that will stop the 20 or so emails from people saying "I am not like that")) are driven by stories. We make our reality by the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what we have done and what we perceive the world to be acting. The better the story, the more we are driven by it. This can be for evil or good purposes.. but for the extent of this blog I will try to focus on the good.

If you look at distributions as caravans of people travelling through the wastes of the digital desert then you can see metaphors for each distribution (as mpdehaan says). This story is strong in that it says what kind of people we are looking for.

Fedora wants to be the explorer who is never happy to long at any oasis. We may linger at some, but not too many.. We are looking for new explorers but not just any 'newbie'. They have to be wanting to see new things, go over the next hill when the caravan leader calls out etc. On the other hand, we are not looking for barbarians or raiders. We want to set-up and trade at the next oasis or town.. not plunder and pillage... We do not poison the wells when we leave because we never know when we might come back in some form.. or when our elder Aunt's caravan (RHEL) might show up to set up a town. We are not thieves, if we find something stolen, we will endeavour to return it.

We have customs we follow and expect people visiting our camps to follow. If we share code with you, we expect it to be shared back. Things like that.