Fedora shares strategy updates and "weird research university" model

In early February, members of the Fedora Council met in Tirana, Albania to discuss and set the strategic direction for the Fedora Project. The council has published summaries from its strategy summit, and Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta, as well as some of the council members, held a video meeting to discuss outcomes from the summit on February 25. Topics included a plan to experiment with Open Collective to raise funds for specific Fedora projects, tools to build image-based editions, and more. Spaleta also explained his model for Fedora governance.

The weird university

Spaleta began the meeting by explaining his mental model of the Fedora Project and its governance. He thinks of the project as a "weird research university", with himself as the university president and his primary task being to set its overall strategic vision and mission. Red Hat is its funding organization, and he likened the company's role to that of a state legislature funding higher education.

The Fedora Council, he said, is much like the trustees or regents of a university, with project contributors being the university's faculty, and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) acting as a faculty senate. Red Hat's open-source program office (OSPO) and community Linux engineering (CLE) team are "among staff and administration" in this metaphor, and Fedora users are the students and the public. The council "sits in the uncomfortable position" between the contributors and funding sponsor that provides resources. Its job is to translate between cultures, he said.

Nonprofit

Part of that translation exercise has been a long-running conversation between the council and Red Hat about setting up some kind of nonprofit entity for Fedora. Spaleta said that the project is looking at Open Collective as a fiscal host to hold funds for specific Fedora activities. During the Q&A portion of the call, he expanded a bit on this to say that he wanted to start with a well-scoped, time-limited project to learn from; if that was successful, then the project could attempt bigger and better things.

To begin with, projects through Open Collective would likely be event-related, but Fedora may go beyond events if the initial tests are successful. "The sky's the limit", Spaleta said, "we just have to work the process and get better at it and work trust into it."

Council member Aleksandra Fedorova noted that some people might be disappointed because they expected "something larger" from conversations about Fedora having a nonprofit. But, for now, the goal was to collect money for specific activities rather than a big bucket of funds that would be spent by the council. The body is tasked with coming up with a framework for members of the community to propose projects, and Fedorova invited people who wanted to collaborate on that process to reach out. The expectation is that more concrete details will be presented at the Fedora contributor conference, Flock, in June.

Konflux

Fedora has been producing various image-based editions, such as Atomic Desktops, Fedora CoreOS, and Fedora IoT, for more than a decade now. However, the various groups producing those editions have not always worked together in creating or adopting tooling to create the image artifacts. Thus, the Image Mode initiative was created to put together a unified pipeline for building, delivering, and hosting artifacts for those editions. The initiative, led by council member Laura Santamaria, has been working to get Fedora to adopt Konflux to produce bootable containers (bootc) as the standard artifact type for image-based releases.

Konflux is an Apache-licensed, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform for building, testing, and releasing software artifacts—including bootc images and RPMs. It is a project led by Red Hat that is being used by the company in its internal build systems. Currently, Fedora uses the Koji build system to create its artifacts, but there is work going on currently to set up Konflux as a parallel build system for creating bootc images. However, at this time, Konflux is only being used in a proof-of-concept capacity for pre-release images; the final images for the Fedora 44 release in April will be produced by Koji.

The Fedora Council is involved in the discussion, Spaleta said, to provide an opinion statement on whether Konflux is suitable for Fedora. He stressed that using Konflux is "not a mandate" from Red Hat, but a push from the Image Mode initiative team to use the project because it solves the team's problems.

During the council summit, Fedorova gave a presentation about the project; Spaleta said, based on what he had learned, "it feels like it's the reasonable technology to move forward with for that purpose". Fedorova emphasized that the conversation right now is strictly about building bootc artifacts for the Image Mode projects, and any conversations around using Konflux for RPMs would be separate.

It may not be a mandate, but Red Hat has been expressing interest in persuading Fedora to adopt Konflux for a while now. In March 2025, Red Hat engineering manager Brendan Conoboy started a discussion to ask when it would be the right time to bring up using Konflux in Fedora. Miro Hrončok asked why Fedora would want to use Konflux rather than Koji. "It's presented as 'the new cool thing,' yet I struggle to grasp the basic motivation. Call me old fashioned if you must – I'd appreciate an elevator pitch for 'why should I want this'".

Conoboy responded with Red Hat's motivation rather than what might motivate Fedora packagers: the effort of maintaining all the disparate build systems within Red Hat is expensive. Red Hat has chosen to invest in one "secure software development pipeline" that it will use for all of its products and that might be used by other organizations for similar development needs. Since Red Hat also, ultimately, pays for the upkeep of Koji and other Fedora build systems, it is not surprising that it would want to see the project standardize on Konflux as well.

Defining membership

In January there was a debate over one of Fedora's special-interest groups (SIGs) handing out temporary membership to allow voting in FESCo elections. How to define membership was expected to be a topic of discussion at the council summit. During the Q&A period of the meeting, Michael Winters asked if there were any concrete conclusions or action items toward defining Fedora membership that had come out of the summit.

Spaleta said that the council did not manage to "get something actionable in terms of measurement" for contributions. One problem is deciding what is in scope to consider as a contribution to Fedora, then figuring out how to measure those contributions. Spaleta also said that he has to start surfacing some metrics for his role as FPL to be able to measure work in trying to increase contributions. Fedorova stressed the importance of being flexible in terms of deciding what constitutes a contribution. "We have to leave the door open for people to come and tell us how they actually contribute in ways we haven't anticipated before".

Fedora council member Justin Wheeler said that he is tasked with coming up with a proposal around membership for the council. He mentioned that there were discussions about a "vouch-based system" that would allow existing members to vouch for new ones. However, he cautioned that more conversations would be needed and said the community could expect to hear more in the lead-up to the Flock conference.

It would seem that little was decided during the annual council summit, but some progress was made while the members were face-to-face. The Fedora community should expect to see some concrete proposals for membership and experimental fundraising by the time Flock rolls around in June.