Slightly OT: bad rap for Fedora, and realistic effects

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 2/23/07, Mike Kearey <mkearey at redhat.com> wrote:
> I get the feeling you have managed to convince yourself that there is
> some malevolent influence at work in Fedora, and we may never convince
> you otherwise... But we can try.

I'd almost like it more if there were a smoke-filled room inside RH-HQ
manipulating things in an organized way. But really, the problem is
more of the opposite. It's obvious to me that there's been a lack of
organization of interests inside the fenceline.  Luckily for you and
the other corporate serfs, I'm not in charge of Red Hat's internal
Fedora education program.  My seminars focus primarily on the use of
tactile educational reinforcement, in the form of a baseball bat and
kneecaps.  Though if your manager at Red Hat is interested, I can be
hired for just this sort of task on a consulting basis.

That lack of internal organization on Red Hat's part, as a managing
entity, has probably been the most frustrating thing to community
leaders who want to work inside the project without having their work
obsoleted by work being done internally that wasn't communicated
externally. I'd be more specific, but the point of this email isn't to
dredge up bad blood so I won't.   I will say, that I am hopeful that
the merger process is going to shake the most frustrating issues out
(though I'm sure we will find new frustrations), as more and more of
RedHat's engineers are asked to do work as part of the merged Fedora
project.  I don't expect it to go perfectly smoothly either. Injecting
a group of new people with a common working culture, into another
working culture, is bound to cause...friction...and some control
issues. But at the end of the day, most of us are hungry enough for
the resulting omelet even if we know we'll be a little messy cooking
it.

Though its not just the engineers, RedHat's employees who deal with
things like training need to be encouraged to engage in the Fedora
project as part of the job as well.  So really the idea of the
'merger' between Core and Extras has to be bigger than just what we
currently have as the Fedora codebase. We have to continue to 'merge'
the interests of different groups inside RedHat's existing corporate
culture with the overlapping but not dis-similar interests of external
contributors in the Fedora community.

-jef