I’m reading the IRC #fedora-board-meeting as I write this, with a discussion going on about the Vision statement for Fedora and it occurs to me that Fedora is really an Adjective.

Fedora Project
Fedora Hosted
Fedora People
Fedora Distribution
Fedora Community

These are all tightly related. I think the first thing to note is that the vision statement has to be for a coherent subset of these.

Fedora as a distribution is the product.

Fedora as a community is built around the distribution

The Fedora project exists to produce the distribution, but also to provide a community to support the open source projects that contribute to the distribution. In other words, if the distribution were to disappear, the community and the project would still have a purpose.  The distribution serves as a common goal to tie the community together.  Thus the first part of the mission statement should be something like:

The Fedora project produces a distribution of Free and Open Source software in order to

You see here my Army training in converting this to a standard mission statement.  Who is defined as the Fedora project.  The task is “produce” which is fairly specific, I think.

The trickiest part is the why, and I think that ties in  with the original question of “what is the vision statement?”

Why does Fedora exist?  From a Red Hat perspective, it exists as a noise barrier:  let much of the Sturm and drang of open source development happen in a chaotic environment that produces an integrated distribution.  It allows the integration of a large array of projects to happen in a way that doesn’t produce a Commercial Product: no Tech Support  contract requirement.

From an individual project perspective, Fedora is a known set of integration points that continually evolves.  It provides a means to advertise and distribute your particular project in a larger distribution.  It is a software ecosystem that is neither so static that it stagnates, and not so dynamic that it is completely unstable.

It is that tension, that balance between extremes that requires oversight.  The goal of Fedora is to promote Freedom.  With the computer being the main tool of communication for a large portion of the planet, FOSS becomes a matter of human rights.  I think this is as far as we need to go.  Fedora is primarily a software-focused organization.  A mission statement is not the place to enumerate all of an organizations values.

[in order to ]  foster the evolution and integration of free and open source software

Of course, Fedora does far more than just produce the install-able distribution.  It maintains the servers that are integral to building and using the software.  But all that is supporting the mission.  So, here is my take on a Fedora Mission (not vision) statement:

The Fedora project produces a distribution of free and open source software in order to foster the evolution and integration of free and open source software.