How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business(ars technica)

The double-edge sword of embracing a higher level of transparency. When confusion dominates, everybody is there to see it. You can either hide the dirty laundry or you can challenge people to pitch in and help clean it up.

To me the handling of the recovery associated with the false start of rhpl and the reboot as fedora with the fedora.us merge is exactly why I continue to trust Red Hat. Messy and painful...but exceedingly honest as to pain points, difficulties and expectations. This was not a promise the moon or a "trust us" endeavor. The candor as to not having a fully realized gameplan on how to leverage community involvement said to me that there was a real opportunity for externals to have a say and to influence the structure of the fedora project long term.

Yes even with the teeth pulling slowness to provide external access to a build system for Fedora Core..even with those stumbles..watching an established corporate entity re-orient so significantly with regard to open and transparent community centric approach to development is very instructive. If Red Hat can do it, other existing corporate entities can do it. There are a lot of hard fought lessons learned in that history I think that should be distilled for reference. Obviously the relationship across the corporate fenceline it not perfect, whatever that means. But it appears to be working, sustainable and significantly more beneficial for the entire linux software ecosystem, in a way that the rhl era of operation was not.

-jef