Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Setting a clear and crisp vision is crucial to create an aligned organisation. Refining down into an elevator-pitch sized statement while avoiding generalisations, platitudes and (frankly) abstract jibberish is practically impossible.

Doing so outside a corporate environment I think is even more difficult – money is at least a straightforward motivation to hang a hat on. One of the best guides to doing this is Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start Manifesto, I particularly like the bit about making mantra.

The new mission for Fedora is:

Fedora creates an innovative platform that lights up hardware, clouds, and containers for software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users.

Unfortunately a few weasel words have crept in (“innovative”, “solutions”, “platform”), but I love the overall trust of it. The four foundations are pretty close to being a mantra and they’re indirectly reflected in this.

The main thing I find disappointing is that the mission ties in specifically to a few delivery mechanisms. Lighting up containers should be a consequence of the mission, and not be part of the mission, for my money. Containers are very relevant today – but are they going to be relevant in five year’s time?

Fedora is an operating system, the role of an operating system is to create an environment in which software can be allocated the resources with which to run. The end user value in having an operating system is precisely that you can run software easily. Having great support for containers is, right now, singularly important is being able to do that.

Let’s quickly thing about the future, though. Containers are one piece of technology, Kubernetes is a broader one. Day by day, I see more and more investment in k8s – to the extent that relatively soon we’ll need to think about k8s as an operating system in its own right. It’s never going to replace Fedora, and Fedora can run within k8s, but applications that run on k8s need to be quite specifically tailored for that – or even designed for that from the start. The whole story that k8s has is really about resource allocation.

Kubernetes isn’t the last word by any means. The true future is Serverless, which is coming at us at a rate of knots. Should this be part of mission? Right now, almost certainly not – but the mission should be the test. If the mission is about delivery of an environment in which people can run software, Serverless software will become increasingly relevant in that mission in the near future.

The really positive thing about the mission is that it can be used to test ideas. If something isn’t aimed at developers or the community, it likely doesn’t fall into the mission. Replacing legacy Unix is not part of the mission either.

If the redefined mission ends up being useful, it will be because it helps align the community and enables better, more consistent decisions to be taken – everyone will help push Fedora in the same direction. It will be great to see that happen.