Fedora Foundation: DONT IGNORE

Sat Jan 21 07:46:48 UTC 2006

[All opinions are my own]

Andy Green wrote:

>akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I agree this is a dead horse but it should not be. We are either a
>>community or we are not. Red Hat is in business and they can do with
>>there products what they want to. But then don't ask us to put money
>>into a Fedora Foundation where we can pay out money to be ignored.
>>    
>>
>
>This Fedora Foundation changeover seems to have happened already in a
>sufficiently low key way that many folks were not really aware of it,
>including me.  Then this "will you pay money" email seemed to assume
>that everybody would know what they were being asked to pay money for
>without spelling out why they might want to.  Reading it, I had no idea
>why I would want to give what still seemed to me "RedHat" my money.
>Fedora Foundation Folks: many people don't seem know anything about what
>is going on, get the message saturated out there then talk about
>donations, and when talking about donations, explain why you would want
>to donate.
>
>It seems that the new deal is that the Fedora Foundation will decide
>what is to happen with the general goals of Fedora now, so your
>description above is outdated now apparently.  How it differs I don't
>really know but I gather it is meant to be a completely standalone
>creature made up of meriotcratic community folk.
>  
>
Ok. Time to provide some details then... When Red Hat originally 
launched Red Hat Linux project which later merged with the earlier 
fedora.us effort into a Fedora Project, Red Hat announced its intention 
early about opening up its distribution into a community oriented 
development instead of merely providing a end product under a open 
source license. The community has very high expectations from Red Hat.  
This is double edged sword. While it announced its intention, everybody 
wanted immediate action. It as not originally possible for the community 
to actually contribute anything beyond bug fixes and stuff that it could 
have done anyway with Red Hat Linux. It took years for the project to 
get off its ground with opening up cvs, Fedora Extras, Fedora Legacy and 
so on. Still there were some concerns with Red Hat as a commercial 
entity holding all the copyrights etc to the project.  While capitalism 
is all fine and dandy, some of the volunteers within the project are 
inherently skeptical about commercial entities managing a community 
project. They believe they will get themselves screwed by it.  Some of 
the concerns are merely perceptions and other genuine. What Red Hat has 
aimed to do with the Fedora foundation is provide a independent entity 
that holds all the copyrights, trademarks etc for its own and other 
community contributions that is different from its commercial open 
source product - Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The foundation manages and 
directs all the Fedora projects going forward. It can bless, reject 
Fedora projects, both established and proposed ones. It can pull of 
stale projects or entities within any of the Fedora project on extreme 
occasions (hopefully not required ever). Red Hat by the virtue of its 
contributions steers ahead one of the Fedora Foundation managed sub 
projects - Fedora Core. Rest of the Red Hat announced its intention to 
create such a foundation a while back. Some updates and goals are 
available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Foundation. While Red Hat has 
accomplished some of the goals it doest intend to do a more public 
announcement until all the deliverables are met. It can be said that it 
learned its lessen against setting too high expectations as it did 
originally with by prematurely announcing Fedora project.  This time 
around its going through the processes within a relatively small circle 
of high profile open source contributors especially those with a 
established history of building such communities. When Red Hat passes 
the litmus test of acceptance from this group and establishes various 
other processes it can shoot for a more public announcement. Till then 
it is sort of a public secret. The Foundation as a legal entity already 
this though. A board that is community based is in the road map as a 
high priority item.

Why does Fedora Foundation need money?

Red Hat's revenue source primarily is RHEL. Fedora from a business point 
of view does not provide any direct revenue being a gratis software. In 
fact in by itself it reduces it. Red Hat justifies this by the value of 
its presence within the community and the ability to build a similar 
code base between Fedora and RHEL which enables community feedback on 
Fedora to be useful for both Fedora and RHEL. Red Hat intents to 
continue providing significant funding for Fedora but if it does that is 
a hindrance to establishes 501(3) status for Fedora foundation as 
required by the law. 501(3) status is important if the community 
provides funds needs to be tax deductible. These funds to the Fedora 
Foundation will establish it to providing funding to projects and 
community members that is not directly dependent on RHEL. By providing 
this financial freedom,  Red Hat can avoid getting into perceptions of 
using Fedora as a test bed by enabling the foundation to explore and 
establish other community projects within the Fedora space. This 
includes for example the Fedora patents commons project.  The potential 
for this is expected to be immense but we need answers from the 
community that Elliot Lee asked for.

Would you be willing to donate money to the Fedora Foundation? 	Why/why not?

Do you live in a country where donations to non-profit organizations may be tax deductible? Does the tax deductability of your contributions affect your willingness to donate?

How does Red Hat's involvement in and funding of Fedora affect your willingness to donate to the Foundation? Your willingness to participate in Fedora?

You can send answers as well as more questions to Elliot Lee (sopwith AT Red Hat.com). 

The reason this was asked to each list member individually is to enable them to respond privately about this financial issue which might be too sensitive for them to reveal 
publictly on the list.  Red Hat will not ask for money for Fedora project. It will continue to do what it can provide freely within its financial limits. 
The Fedora foundation also cannot get any funds at this point.  There is a need for the above to be answered by the community to establish the process moving forward 
to the board as well as the counsel. I request the community at large to take these details into consideration and respond carefully to Elliot.
Your responses will affect the future of this project. Feel free to pass on this message to anyone interested in Fedora.

>Let's give Rahul some slack here: he is a regular visible Redhat
>presence on the list.  I can remember a time before Rahul when I was
>moaning that there was no regular visible Redhat presence on the list.
>  
>
I am not sure everybody knows this but I have been a contributor to 
Fedora long before I joined Red Hat (can be said that RH hired me 
because of that though I dont work directly on Fedora for them now). I 
intend to continue working for the community and getting sponsored by 
Red Hat in a way.

>Just looking at the last couple of day's traffic and imagining if I had
>that job, I would have blown a fuse by now and be telling people to
>Mandriva Ubuntu to where the sun don't shine.
>
>As to opinions being ignored out of hand, this is a wide open Internet
>Mailing List, some of the (I mean this only in the general) opinions
>here will only be worth ignoring out of hand.  Yeah okay like mine.
>
>-Andy
>  
>
I would request active list members to sign up a report writer and 
produce weekly reports on this list covering major discussions in a 
concise summary at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Projects/WeeklyReports. 
It would make my intention to provide a sounding board and would open 
better communication channels between the community at large and 
developers.  It is increasing hard for me to respond questions in this 
list due to the amount of hostility expressed and that I have to 
actually work on projects rather than spending all my volunteer time 
merely answering questions in this list. Red Hat presence on this list 
is low due to the high amount of traffic and not that it doesnt want to 
listen. If you bring up important development discussions to 
fedora-devel list through detailed proposals and file bug reports and 
feature enhancements in http://bugzilla.redhat.com, Red Hat will be able 
to respond efficiently compared to the responses here on the list. Thank 
you.

-- 
Rahul 

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