A Talk with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields [LWN.net]

By Rebecca Sobol
May 13, 2008

Late last week I had the pleasure of talking with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields. Our conversation covered a range of Fedora Project topics, including Fedora 9, the latest Fedora release.

One thing Paul is passionate about is getting people to volunteer. There are many ways to get involved with the Fedora Project, lots of sub-projects and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that people can join depending on their interests and talents. The Fedora Project wiki is a good starting point for finding out more. The Join Fedora page also goes into the various roles that a Fedora contributor might be suited for, with easy links to setting up a Fedora account and using the Fedora Account system. You don't have to be a programmer or a computer expert to contribute to the project.

Joining the Fedora Project is easier now than it ever was during Fedora's five year history. As a result Fedora now has over 2000 registered account holders. That includes about 350 ambassadors who promote Fedora in their local area. In addition to making it easier to become a Fedora contributor, a variety of new web applications/collaborative tools are now available for contributors. Of course all Fedora infrastructure is Free Software, available in the Fedora repository, and running on Fedora.

All registered account holders may vote in Fedora elections, which is worth noting because there is an election coming up in June.

The composition of the Fedora board was recently changed to five elected members of the nine board seats. Four of those seats will be voted on in the next election. The other board seats are appointed by Red Hat, but are not necessarily Red Hat employees. Red Hat retains some control by employing and appointing the Project Leader. Paul took a job with Red Hat when he was offered the position of Project Leader.

Paul mentioned that former Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack is moving to the Netherlands to organize and manage Fedora volunteers in Europe. Paul also mentioned that Fedora has many Brazilian contributors. Of course Red Hat employs some Fedora engineers. There are fourteen Red Hat employees working full time on Fedora, mostly acting as team leaders and organizing the volunteers. In addition all Red Hat engineers will spend some fraction of their time working on Fedora in areas where Red Hat Enterprise Linux in involved.

Some people think of Fedora as a beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but its more realistic to think of Fedora as the upstream source for its enterprising cousin and spin-offs such as CentOS. So even though Fedora is a community project, Red Hat is still very involved in its development.

FUDCon (Fedora User & Developer Conference) is an event held on an irregular schedule several times per year. Some are smaller events held in conjunction with a larger event, such as the May 30, 2008 FUDCon, which will be held at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany. Further out, there is some talk of having a mini-FUDCon at the 2009 linux.conf.au. The Boston FUDCon coming up in June, will run for several days. Co-located with the Red Hat Summit, the Boston FUDCon will feature hackfests, a barcamp and technical talks.

The Red Hat Summit will bring in Red Hat customers, and include talks about actual use cases. These talks should be interesting for Fedora developers, who will have a chance to see what people are doing with their work downstream. FUDCon is open to anyone, so stop by if there is a FUDCon in your area.

On to the just released Fedora 9 and the upcoming Fedora 10. Fedora 9 is one of the first major releases to feature KDE 4 by default. To make this work, the KDE SIG has built a compatibility library to keep KDE 3 applications running properly. For Fedora 10 Casey Dahlin is working on replacing the init system with upstart, the system developed for Ubuntu.

Some other items that we touched on briefly: Fedora maintains an open build system and works at getting patches upstream. The project also strives to cooperate with other distributions. From what I've seen, Fedora 9 looks very good, attractive and functional. Now that rawhide has moved on to Fedora 10 it will be a rough ride for at least a few days. So stick with Fedora 9, or get it from a mirror near you.

Fedora 9 is Paul's first release as Project Leader and he had a few words to add. "It's been less than five years since the first release of Fedora (back when it was called Fedora Core), and in that time Fedora has become not just a vibrant, innovative, and extremely popular Linux distribution, but also a thriving community. A community that believes that free and open source software is not just something you *use*, it's something you *do* -- something to which you *contribute*."

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