Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
| From: | "Paul W. Frields" <stickster-AT-gmail.com> | |
| To: | fedora-advisory-board <fedora-advisory-board-AT-redhat.com>, fedora-devel-announce-AT-redhat.com, fedora-announce-list <fedora-announce-list-AT-redhat.com> | |
| Subject: | Change in Board composition | |
| Date: | Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:09:28 -0400 | |
| Message-ID: | <1208815768.4737.54.camel@localhost.localdomain> | |
| Cc: | fedora-board-list <fedora-board-list-AT-redhat.com> |
Since the Fedora Board originally formed in 2006, the Fedora Project has changed quite a bit. We now have about two-thirds of our packages maintained by volunteer community members. Our technical steering committee, FESCo, is made up of a roughly even mix of volunteers and Red Hat employees. This community has developed and enforced its own high standards and done it in an open and transparent fashion in the best tradition of open source. And through all of these efforts, we've helped build a community of contributors -- not just people who *use* Fedora, but people who *give back* to the open source ecosystem, and their fellow human beings. I'm very pleased to report that with the post-Fedora 9 election, the Board composition will be a better reflection of the strides our community has made in self-organization and self-governance, and of our healthy partnership with Red Hat. Starting with this election, the Board will move to a composition of five (5) community-elected seats and four (4) Red Hat-appointed seats. This is an issue I've been advocating over the past couple of weeks, and I'm delighted to be able to make this change following my first release as Fedora Project Leader. I look at this as a significant step in the evolution of the Board and Fedora's governance overall. The rest of the Board and I look forward to the elections, and to the continued opportunity to serve everyone in the Fedora community. We appreciate the support and the trust you give us, and will always work hard to earn it. Thanks for reading! -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug -- fedora-announce-list mailing list fedora-announce-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list
(Log in to post comments)
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 22, 2008 19:05 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
This looks like a change mostly designed to improve appearances. Before, no one could overrule RH. Now, it takes a unanimous vote by the non-RH members to override RH. I pretty much approve of the way RH handles things most of the time. But I'm not sure that "Community Dominated Board" accurately reflects this setup, which still leaves RH with a nearly iron grip on the board.
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 22, 2008 20:15 UTC (Tue) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]
Sure, but I doubt anyone really expects a substantial change as long as Red Hat uses Fedora as a perpetual beta for Red Hat Enterprise -- and foots the substantial tab for both their full-time developers. Quid pro quo. The volunteer community is also important, perhaps even equally (or more) so. And volunteers need a reason to volunteer. (One good one per volunteer will often suffice.) But at the end of the day either somebody has responsibility for driving this train, or we have another Debian. Red Hat has the commercial interest, and provides concomitant infrastructure and support.Which isn't meant as a snipe at Debian. Only that we already have one of them. Canonical does well by it, but I doubt there's any real reason -- or interest -- in having another.
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 22, 2008 20:17 UTC (Tue) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]
Or to put it another way: The governance of the Fedora Project is now dominated by the community. Unfortunately -- for detractors of a rapidly-moving, exciting distribution which has made all of its build infrastructure code available to all -- this removes one of the last barbs which has been flung at the project. This presents a problem for those seeking to create negative impressions of Fedora and they will now have to resort to weaselly constructions such as "nearly iron grip."
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 22, 2008 20:35 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
And before you wonder if `nearly iron' is as bad as `iron': would *you* want to stand on a bridge made out of nearly iron?
Bridges, and Code is King
Posted Apr 22, 2008 21:39 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
That depends? Is a steel bridge nearly iron ? Clearly rust and fool's gold which are both very high in iron aren't suitable for making a good bridge. On the other hand stone and wood are both quite low in iron ordinarily, and have made reliable, and sometimes very pretty bridges for hundreds of years. Also, its 2008 and Unicode has been available on Linux systems for a long while now, time to stop abusing obsolete fixed pitch typefaces and pretending that U+0060 and U+0027 are the pair of (English) facing quote marks you're looking for, try these two instead. But seriously, Code is King, so long as Red Hat's employees do the majority of the work (which they do) then Red Hat controls Fedora, no matter who votes for what in which meeting. Wrestling control away from Red Hat, only to have the project sink without trace, would not be a success story for the "Fedora community" whatever that is. (Is it me? I use Fedora and file some bugs, and sometimes I suggest small patches? Plus some of my software is in Fedora?)
Bridges, and Code is King
Posted Apr 22, 2008 22:07 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That depends? Is a steel bridge “nearly iron” ?Super-RH, Distro of Steel!
Clearly rust and fool's gold which are both very high in iron aren't suitable for making a good bridge. On the other hand stone and wood are both quite low in iron ordinarily, and have made reliable, and sometimes very pretty bridges for hundreds of years.So it's like irony, then? (Sorry.)
Also, its 2008 and Unicode has been available on Linux systems for a long while now, time to stop abusing obsolete fixed pitch typefaces and pretending that U+0060 and U+0027 are the pair of (English) facing quote marks you're looking for, try ‘these two’ instead.I don't have a keyboard that generates those (does anyone?) so typing them in is much too annoying. No software I have access to replaces normal quote marks with those, and even if they did I defy them to do it reliably in the presence of nested quotation marks and apostrophes (TeX did it, but only by translating ` ' into real quotation marks). Plus, to add insult to injury, hey look identical in most of my system's Unicode fonts unless you blow them up to 20-point plus.
Thanks, but no thanks. Way too many downsides. (I know that the backquote is the wrong shape in most modern fonts: perhaps just using ' or " consistently would be preferable.)
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 22, 2008 21:15 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Wow. No need for such oversensitivity. I've always liked Redhat's project management style. I was nervous when they started talking about turning Redhat Linux into a community project back in the RedHat Linux Project days. It's worked out pretty well, but I do believe in calling a spade a spade. "Fedora goes to a community-dominated" board is is deceptive, regardless of the fact that I rather prefer the project to remain firmly under RedHat's control. I indicated that in my original post; You have no basis for calling me a detractor. Look at it this way. If republicans were guaranteed 56% of seats in congress and the rest of the seats went to republicans or democrats depending upon their election results, and then we backed that off to only 44% guaranteed seats being guaranteed for republicans, one would hardly call that "Going to a Democrat-dominated Congress". That is as much time as I choose to waste on this topic.
Fedora goes to a community-dominated board
Posted Apr 23, 2008 2:45 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
It should be noted that Fedora Engineering Steering Committee which is the governing body that makes technical decisions is fully elected. The Fedora Board is involved with strategy and community discussions is a majority elected body. In day to day activities, whoever does the work involved gets to decide how it is done. That has been pretty much been always the case within Fedora.