The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 18:55 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: The end of the Fedora Foundation by error27
Parent article: The end of the Fedora Foundation

That definition of 'community' is nonsensical; these days the vast majority of the work on Free or Open Source Software is done by people paid to work on that software; ie employees of some other entity. This is especially true of the Linux kernel.

You are confused in your defintion of "community", because that can be defined in many different ways. Do you perhaps mean a community of *users* or a community of *developers*? Using the former, I don't know of any distributions which can be called "community-driven", but using the latter, nearly everyone qualifies, including Fedora.

Free Software has always been about contribution; The best way to influence the process of your favorite project is to, well, contribute some work.

Note that crucial word: Contribution.

The majority of the developers contributing to Fedora are paid by RedHat and thus work towards RedHat's interests. Why shouldn't RedHat have the largest say in what Fedora does?

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:51 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link] (1 responses)

The key to what I was saying was that it's not _Linus's_ employee's who work on the kernel. It's employee's from RedHat, IBM, Novell etc who work on the kernel.

This affects how work is done. Linus doesn't say, "Bob, you work on devfs. Steve you work on preemption." Everyone decides for themselves what to work on. Sometimes the community can decide that some areas need more focus.

Obviously, Debian is a community effort. So it can be done.

When Fedora first launched some people hoped more developers would join the Fedora community and maintain packages. For example, Abiword was completely broken in rh9 and it caused the Abiword developers a lot of support headaches. If they could just distribute their own RPMs through the Fedora project maybe they could have avoided that.

It didn't turn out that way.

These days if Abiword was broken the developers would hopefully notice it before it went gold and file a bugzilla entry. So it's an improvement from before at least...

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 7, 2006 16:37 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

These day the upstream Abiword developers maintain the packages themselves in Fedora Extras and they like it better now than ever.