Is this real or spam

[Rahul Sundaram]

[not speaking on behalf of Red Hat or the Fedora Foundation]

Chasecreek Systemhouse wrote:

>On 1/17/06, Elliot Lee <sopwith at redhat.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>saw a chance to ask people's opinions, I jumped on it.
>>    
>>
>
>Does/Must substantial support always mean money?  What about those who
>have invested their time and efforts into testing, using, et al, etc.
>  
>
The mail clearly mentioned that you do not have to offer any money at 
this point. The foundation is not even ready to receive donations at 
this point. Other forms of support and effort have always been 
significant and most welcome as usual.

>If it does mean money -- does Red Hat have the mnost to gain from the
>OS public at large efforts?
>
The idea behind the project has always been to be mutually beneficial. 
The user gets a Free and open source operating system with major feature 
additions every few months delivered by an organization with a large 
amount of expertise to provide advantages that the community on its own 
might not be able to do. Fedora project developers in return gain from 
by tapping into the feedback from the community at large. Also any 
donations to the Fedora foundation can only be spend on Fedora to my 
understanding.

>  Would Red Hat not be a substantial
>supporter?  I mean -- isn't the over all goal of the FC project to
>become a testing ground for best of breed projects to make it into
>RHEL?
>
>Please feel free to set me straight because I think I may be confused.
>  
>
The project can be faulted for not setting the expectations right. When 
the project started out the mapping between Fedora Core and RHEL was 
very direct leading to this criticism but over a period of time it was 
evolved into different dimensions of a community oriented project as 
originally planned out. There are packages in RHEL not part of Fedora 
Core as an example of this change in the product relationship. The 
opening up of Fedora Extras, handing over the lead efforts for many sub 
projects to the community members, the process involved in Fedora 
Foundation are all part of this goal. Setting up a foundation supported 
largely by Red Hat (which is likely to be desirable) seems to be an 
issue to gain 501(c) (3) status and the foundation needs to show 
substantial public support to attain this.  The current query is to 
understand whether the community is interested in such a effort and then 
determine the subsequent steps based on your responses. Other details on 
the foundation is available from

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundation

There will be a more public announcement after all the deliverables are 
ready.

-- 
Rahul 

Fedora Bug Triaging - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers