[Fedora-electronic-lab] Community Questions

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 2:52 AM, John Rizzo < wrote:
> So my question is; Is anyone interested in growing this project from a
> "Fedora Electronics Lab" to a Open Electronics Lab?  I would certainly be
> happy to contribute my time to helping bring these applications to at least
> one other distribution.

Hello John,

Actually I think the use of the word "Fedora" here confused you :) We
are actually "Open" Electronic Lab. We work with upstream and will
support any distribution which wishes to do something similar to our
roadmap.

For example, we (FEL team) support CentOS-5, RHEL-5 and
Scientific-Linux-5 with the EPEL repository. I know Aanjhaan was
packaging EDA software under the FEL umbrella for Ubuntu. I don't know
what its status is.

However the only limitation is "time". We are all community
contributors. For on my behalf, I focus on making my time useful for
others and getting the job done.

But building this  "open" electronic lab is more than packaging, let me explain.

The use of "Fedora" in Fedora Electronic Lab is only to give this
"Open" Electronic Lab, all the existing Fedora infrastructures:
* marketing ( spreading livedvd during events paid under Fedora
budget, sponsoring contributors to give talks about this "open"
electronic lab around the world, again paid under Fedora budget)
* Ambassadors : getting more people talk about opensource EDA in their
own languages
* build system and mirror
* package reviews and guidelines ( make it very easy to get new
packagers, through proper sponsoring and guidelines - do not let the
package rot during long package reviews --- very time consuming)
* help from other fedora/redhat developers
* Test and QA engineers and many test days organized. see Fedora-Test
mailing list for these test days
* hosting facilities (again, paid under Fedora budget)
* legal advice from redhat lawyers concerning licenses. - free for us
* artwork and web designers
* regular security assessments from FESCo members

Hence contributors like me and Shakthi can focus only about electronic
related packages and providing a final "product" (livedvd) to the
user, and communicate with the rest of the fedora community for any
help in the above list.

Since FEL is a spin of fedora with fedora branding, it gets tagged
with "Fedora".

In order to push the status of this "open" Electronic Lab from geek to
a more professional environment, so that small businesses can embrace
open source software, we need an official endorsement. But it is not
all, we(the opensource community) needs to advocate the use of "open"
formats, which also helps interoperability in terms of data exchange.
Hence in order to get heard by the corporate world ( most of the time,
discussing with fedora/redhat Legal), we need a name and clear
endorsement so that corporate entities can trust and listen to us with
the proper respect.

That said, we started everything from scratch back during F-7
development cycle, little by little based on our experience, we have
developed, put in place several infrastructure and got several
contacts.

On the other hand, why contributors can benefit from their
contributions to Fedora? RedHat Enterprise Linux is an EDA Consortium
compatible linux distribution.
http://www.edac.org/industry_roadmap.jsp
Hence if a fel contributor is searching for a job, he/she can make
full use of this status during their job interviews.
Our contributions to the opensource community can easily be
proliferate into systems dedicated for education and small businesses.
This also helps our upstream developers a lot since their software are
being employed into production environment and perhaps get more
patches and contributors.

On top of all these, FEL remains an "open" electronic lab, but with a
clear roadmap to promote opensource
* EDA software
* EDA developers
* hardware communities, eg openmoko
* EDA data formats ...

I would really want another distribution to pick up with similar goals
(but not only simple packaging), so that the whole opensource eco
system can drive forward more quickly.

For this "open" electronic lab we have at Fedora, we currently have a
LOT of work to do. One of the items I really want to push forward are
submission of papers (concerning opensource eda sofware, of course)
for IEEE events, interoperability forums, .... This I believe will
give value to our upstream developers and opensource software overall.

If you are looking forward to provide a similar platform for another
distribution from scratch, you are welcome to do so and we will be
very happy to exchange patches and inform you about certain critical
paths.

If you want to join us to continuously push forward, based on the
existing fedora' EDA platform and infrastruture, we will be very happy
to provide you with any developer credentials you may need. All our
FEL developers(even me) have the same credentials.

I hope I was able to answer you.

Cheers,
Chitlesh Goorah


PS: I secretly want more leaders behind FEL.

-- 
Chitlesh GOORAH
Fedora Electronic Lab Architect
http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL