number of Fedora contributer (was: Re: General information About Fedora)

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Fri Jul 25 18:08:23 UTC 2008


On 25.07.2008 18:44, Jon Stanley wrote:
> 2008/7/25 Oybek Nuriddinov <oybekfedora at gmail.com>:
>> 3. How many members of Fedora
> I'm not sure how you define "members" of Fedora, however, as of the
> last FESCo election there were approximately 1800 people that had
> completed the Fedora Contributor License agreement and belonged to at
> least one other group in the Fedora account system.

Just a note: Measurements methods like this are sometimes used in 
Fedora-land by different people. I'm not completely sure, but Paul for 
example and *IIRC* mentioned some FAS stats in his "state of the union" 
talk on Fudcon Boston 2008; some FAS numbers IIRC were also used in the 
"voter turnout in the board election" discussions on fab-list.

I tend to say it's completely wrong and misleading to use those numbers, 
because

- there is no real mechanism that makes sure that all the people in the 
accounts system are still active. I'm quite sure that there are some 
"inactive" accounts from people; and also tend to say that is likely 
there are some accounts from people that tried to became a contributor 
without succeeding in the end (for example because they found no sponsor)

- FAS is used for things that are not specific to Fedora; you IIRC need 
a FAS account if you want to participate in a fedorahosted project; you 
need one if you want to edit the wiki; and I accidentally stumbled over 
the page http://people.redhat.com/lockhart/ols/SVN-tips.html
a few days ago. Looks like that everyone that wanted to hand in his 
paper for OLS had to register in FAS and apply for cla_done and one 
additional group (there is nothing wrong with using FAS for that IMHO; 
but it doesn't make those people Fedora contributors...)


I even say a few people will highly dislike being counted as Fedora 
contributer just because they are registered in FAS. Example: I was 
counted as OpenSuse contributor in the early OpenSuse days just because 
I had created a account in OpenSuse's FAS-equivalent to get access to 
their bugzilla. So when Novell a few weeks later made a press release 
saying "hey, we attracted 1234567 contributes withing four weeks" I was 
really disappointed because I knew I was one of those, without wanting 
to be one of those :-/

Cu
knurd





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