"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 10:55:56AM -0500, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 9:40 AM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Is it in the board's purview to "lead" the project by singling out
>>>> technologies it wants to move along over the next few releases?
>>>
>>> Yes.  Fedora has limited resources. That means that someone needs to
>>> prioritize the use of those resources.  As a corollary to that it may
>>> mean that some projects/ideas may be denied resources.
>>
>> to be fair the board has no power to allocate resources. The board has NO
>> control over, afaict, ANY of the development teams: kernel, desktop,
>> virtualization.
>>
>> Not sure what difference any of this discussion will make until that weird
>> split of power vs responsibility is resolved.
>
>Hmm true.  When the project is composed of mostly volunteers, no one
>can really allocate manpower resources like you could in a business.
>But what about the other resources available to the Fedora Project,
>like the servers that run the infrastructure and the money given to
>the project by Red Hat?  Aren't those under the ultimate control of
>the board?  If a developer or other project member starts going off in
>a direction that the board feels is detrimental to the project can't
>they deny him/her access to those resources?

I'm struggling to come up with how a project member could go in a direction
that was detrimental to Fedora in a non-obvious, non-malicous way.  There's
a difference between reacting to malice and what we're talking about I think.

At the very least, we don't control upstream development of the packages
we include in the distro for most cases.  Influence, sure.  But we have no
recourse for locking an upstream developer out of something if they are
developing in a manner the project doesn't think would benefit Fedora.

>Hopefully controlling developers though such a negative method is
>never necessary.  Hopefully the board would be able to persuade
>developers that the board's vision is the correct one and would then
>work together with everyone else to accomplish that vision.

About the only cases I can see the Board having actual control over are
things like the contents of a Spin in terms of package set.  And we don't
want to discourage someone from making a derivative or alternative Spin,
so I don't view it as any sort of control at all.

josh