Fedora Social Contract

[seth vidal]

On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 10:28 -0400, Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
> On 7/28/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
> > > Hey guys,
> > >
> > > I've been doing a little bit of pondering over some of the crazier
> > > discussions and events this week, and I came up with a Funny Idea.
> > > How do you feel about the idea of a Fedora Social Contract?
> >
> > Can you explain shortly what the end goal is? I don't see how it will
> > change any growth pains.
> >
> > Rahul
> 
> I'm still a little new to the Fedora world, but I keep seeing this
> theme of Fedora used to be Red Hat, and controlled entirely by Red
> Hat.  Now it's a community effort that Red Hat has a controlling
> interest in.  Red Hat certainly wants this to be a community distro,
> and just five minutes of browsing shows me about 20 different ways I
> can join the community to help out.  If i'm Joe Skeptic though, what
> guarantee is there that I'm really helping the community, and not Red
> Hat?  What sets Fedora apart from Red Hat.  What is the 'community'
> that these Red Hat engineers are talking about?  These are the growing
> pains I refer to.  There are many other of course, but I can't solve
> them all :P
> 

there is no difference b/t being a community member and a red hat
employee.

I started working for rh back in june and for the first little while my
rh account wasn't setup. Do you know what changed in what I could do
with fedora and how I accessed data in the fedora project? Nothing.
Zero.

I don't need the vpn now - I only use it to access my red hat account
email and the intranet - which has NOTHING to do with fedora at all.

A lot of the problem is not that there is some sort of separation b/t
what fedora and red hat is. The problem is the perception and the social
contract you're describing doesn't impact that perception - it just
creates some fake-legalese that we have to step around and undoubtedly
some stickler for the letter of the document will attempt to trot out
and hold our feet to some theoretical flame.

No, a social contract like you describe is just silly.

-sv