Fedora Social Contract

[Rahul Sundaram]

Yaakov Nemoy wrote:

> 
> 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?

Why do you need that guarantee? If you want to exclude Red Hat from 
benefiting in anyway at all then your contributions has to be restricted 
to prevent Red Hat from using it and such a contribution is obviously 
non-free and won't be included in Fedora either.

A open "community" benefit is also inclusive of Red Hat. Any 
contribution under a open license that you contribute can be taken in by 
anyone including commercial vendors. If you contribute to any Free and 
open source software, Red Hat might be benefiting from it and any 
contributions that Red Hat makes benefits everyone including the 
competition. This is by design. A social contract isn't going to change 
any of this.

Our objectives (and guarantees) are clearly described in 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives.

Rahul