Interview with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields
Softpedia has an interview with Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields covering the release of Fedora 9, plans for Fedora 10, and some thoughts about working with other distributions. "
Well, I should point out that FOSS isn't a simple competition; it's more like 'co-opetition' so adopting an 'us vs. them' attitude ends up being not very constructive or healthy. It's much healthier to build FOSS by having a robust policy for dealing with upstream software communities. The Fedora policy of working closely and vigorously with these upstream groups means we're not just consuming that work, we're contributing to it actively. By comparison, simply creating patches in our own distribution creates a maintenance drag, as well as an uneven experience for FOSS users who work on a number of platforms. Having the software work differently on each distribution doesn't reassure users about how well FOSS works. When we find problems, we send the solutions, via patches and other forms, back to the upstream communities and work with them to get them included where they make sense. That improves FOSS for *everyone*, and not just Fedora."