Fedora 7

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 04 Jan 2007 17:50:50 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
> DZ> There's a reason most successful open source projects have
> DZ> benevolent dictators and it's not all a democracy. Thanks.
>
> This statement also contradicts statements from others at Red Hat.  It
> would be really nice to know just what is actually going to happen.

I haven't seen anything, anywhere, to suggest this is going to be a democracy.

The merger is going to be more like opening federally owned land for
homesteading.  Basically everyone is going to rush out and stake some
claims for fertile pieces of unclaimed packaging space. From those
individual homesteaders packaging communities will be built, some
fated to thrive, and some fated to be ghost towns in a couple of
years. Did you know that homesteading was still going on in Alaska
till the 1980's?

The brave new merged world, is going to be more collaborative, and
certainly more supportive of community efforts which are not directly
inline with Red Hat directed initiatives.  But don't get the wrong
idea, there will still be conflicts of interest, and at the end of the
day groups of package owners working in teams will be setting the
directions for that subgroup of packages and driving development
forward in conjunction of the rest of the packaging space.   For
Gnome, the driver seat in the Fedora space is clearly filled by RedHat
engineers so don't expect that to change.  The merger makes it
possible for new people to drive new initiatives in tangent with
current ones. Just don't expect to claim jump existing homesteads, and
forcibly change the direction.

But for other things, that RedHat doesn't have resources invested in,
the merger will definitely matter.  For example we all want to see the
people who are interested in keeping KDE on Fedora sane have a chance
to work on it without undue frustrations. Its no big secret that
RedHat is not making an investment of engineering time into KDE, so
continuing to have it chained up inside a RedHat internal buildsystem
where none of the interested community members can get access to it
blocks that. The merger of the infrastructure absolutely is forward
progress towards fixing some of the problems with KDE in Fedora.

The real question is who is going to end up becoming the benevolent
dictators of the KDE space and is there enough community manpower to
keep KDE afloat. The merger provides the access, but there will
absolutely have to be strong doers to drive the work, instead of just
talkers.  I certainly expect Rex to be involved because he has some
momentum here with his community built packages for KDE.   And I also
expect people leading Fedora Unity to have a hand in the release
engineering aspects of pooping out a KDE-centric installer image since
they have already done livecd spins for KDE. Whomever the drivers of
KDE packaging and installable media end up being inside the Fedora
community, they will absolutely end up making decisions which piss off
some KDE users. Conflicts of interest are inevitable, even for
packaging drivers not sitting inside the RedHat fenceline.


-jef"The merger doesn't so much as change anything with regard to
control of existing things.
The merger provides access so the fedora project can better support
new community initiatives with fedora project infrastructure."spaleta