Fedora 7

[David Zeuthen]

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 17:50 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>>>> "DZ" == David Zeuthen <david at fubar.dk> writes:
> 
> DZ> Sorry for being direct, but it's a little bit delusional to think
> DZ> that just because Core + Extras is getting merged that it's now
> DZ> all community controlled.
> 
> Well, thanks for deflating the hype.  So, according to you, the hype
> about the grand merge with the community is indeed just hype.

Don't be a drama queen, of course it's not hype. I'm just saying, for
example, that many of the core desktop packages that I personally
maintain will still be under my control and there will still be a
desktop team at Red Hat where we decide on features for the next release
and coordinate the maintenance of said packages. 

And now with Core being opened up.. to me it means that everyone can
apply patches but for my packages it still needs ACK / coordination from
me. How is this different from Extras today and why on earth should it
be different? Do you think the merge means that anyone can apply any
patch to any package? That's really naive.

We have an open mailing list too for contributors, sadly it doesn't
receive a lot of useful traffic. Maybe it's because we do our work
upstream as we all should. For the record, we also have close
relationship to many desktop community members for example Richard
Hughes which is an active Fedora user.

(and in the paragraph above 'we' means people working on desktop
packages and that's not restricted to RH employees though today it's
mostly only RH employees. To tell you the truth not a lot of Fedora
contributors have shown interest in the desktop apart from ranting about
it.)

> DZ> In other words, I expect Red Hat employees to still be the
> DZ> significant contributor for a long long time (would *love* to be
> DZ> proved wrong!) and at Red Hat we have, at least, 25 times as many
> DZ> people working on the GNOME than the KDE.
> 
> So?  My comments weren't about gnome versus kde.  I have no reason to
> expect other than that portions of the project which receive the
> greater number of developers from wherever in the community will make
> the most progress.  My comments are about whether Red Hat plans to be
> just a part of the community, and your comments seem to answer than in
> the negative.  Which is directly contradictory to what other folks
> from Red Hat have been saying.
> 
> 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.

You are implying I'm speaking for Red Hat which I'm clearly not. Don't
do that. Thanks.

     David