Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader [LWN.net]

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 7, 2012 22:26 UTC (Tue) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
Parent article: Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Why doesn't Red Hat let the community decide? Is Fedora still a community distro if a company decides its leader? (And don't give the hiring excuse, that is lame)

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Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 0:47 UTC (Wed) by mspevack (subscriber, #36977) [Link] (5 responses)

Virtually every person that has been hired by Red Hat over the past few years to work in a full-time Fedora role (either engineering, marketing, community relations, leadership/management) has been from the open source community.

This includes Robyn, whose first work with Fedora was as a volunteer contributor to the Fedora Marketing team. She led all of the Fedora Marketing efforts for several releases of Fedora. Additionally, she helped to organize multiple FUDCons, and was the primary owner of FUDCon Tempe owner of the incredibly successful FUDCon Tempe in January 2011, all as a community member.

Eventually, Robyn was hired by Red Hat to be Fedora's Program Manager and Schedule Guru, and she has been part of the core Fedora leadership team ever since. She's a fantastic choice for Fedora Project Leader, and she shouldn't be penalized or excluded from that role simply because she *already* works at Red Hat.

Red Hat has proven its bona fides in hiring community members time and again, and continues to do so.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 4:41 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (guest, #40702) [Link] (4 responses)

I think that's the lame excuse mentioned in the question. :-)

The response totally fails to answer the question: is it still a community distro if a company (rather than the community itself) gets to decide who its leader is?

Whether the appointed person is or is not a company associate is not even relevant. The question AFAICT is about who/what gets to appoint the leader, and how.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 15:00 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (3 responses)

What does it mean for the "community" to decide, though? For free software projects in general, whether reasonably characterizable as "community" or not, quasidemocratic election of project leads by users, or even by principal developers, appears to be an uncommon model. So perhaps the issue is limited to distro projects, but why should distro projects be different, and anyway aren't numerically most distro projects, including "community" ones (however one defines that), not run along democratic lines?

Surely no one would claim that non-democratic meritocratic or pseudomeritocratic leadership-emergence models represents "the community deciding" on leadership; that would be indulging in mythology in a rather disturbing way.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 18:32 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (guest, #40702) [Link] (2 responses)

How about using the same standards that already used to appoint the Fedora board members.

They are elected by Fedora community members, except for one (?) seat appointed by Red Hat. Well, I guess one could argue that since there's only one position of leader, this standard is already applied: Red Hat appoints one, and the remaining are elected. But although mathematically correct, this wouldn't be a very honest argument, now would it? :-)

Now, please note I'm not saying the leader must be elected democratically by the community for Fedora to be a community project. It is however a measure of how much control over the project Red Hat wishes to withhold from the community. Maybe it would avoid such undesirable comparisons with the democratically-elected project leaders in democratic community projects if the position had a different title, say “community hoarder for Red Hat”. That would be not only more accurate, but also leave room for the community to choose their own leaders, which any actual community *will* naturally do, regardless of whatever sponsors wish and whatever positions it controls under whatever title.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 18:51 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

"How about using the same standards that already used to appoint the Fedora board members.

They are elected by Fedora community members, except for one (?) seat appointed by Red Hat."

That's not true.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board

"There are nine Board members: five elected by the community and four appointed by Red Hat. Volunteers and Red Hat employees are eligible for all seats, and often volunteers are appointed or Red Hat employees are elected."

I would say that, Red Hat can continue to appoint a leader if there is a real need to do so but the veto right is no longer necessary and should be removed but that argument needs more support from the community and not externally.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 19:27 UTC (Wed) by lxoliva (guest, #40702) [Link]

Oh, well, thanks for the correction. Sadly it totally spoils the joke with the fake argument.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 14:44 UTC (Wed) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (3 responses)

> Why doesn't Red Hat let the community decide? Is Fedora still a community distro if a company decides its leader?

I don't think it's fair to call Fedora a 100% community distro. On the Fedora Project's website it says in several locations that Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat.

I'd say Fedora is a partnership between Red Hat and the community. It works out well for both since Red Hat gets so many talented contributors from the community and the community doesn't have to bare the full cost of creating Fedora.

Even though much of Fedora's leadership is chosen from the community by the community, the actual "Leader" position is not.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 8, 2012 15:09 UTC (Wed) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think the statement "sponsored by Red Hat" itself is in conflict with characterizing Fedora as a "community" distro. To argue otherwise is to apply a double standard to Fedora, since it is undeniable that plenty of projects that we unhesitatingly apply the "community" label to have "sponsors" or some more or less euphemistic equivalent term applied to corporations investing significant resources in the project. It may be that with Fedora what is relevant is the absence of other sponsors of significance, and the degree of resources provided by Red Hat.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 11, 2012 13:59 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmmm. To bikeshed a bit about the term sponsor - I admittedly wouldn't be able to come up with a better word but feel that this one is wrong. Maybe it's my lack of English language skills but it seems to me a sponsor should SPONSOR what is going on, not dictate it. I see SUSE as a community member of the openSUSE community - and although the roles are slightly different due to Fedora being a rather different community, I think Red Hat has a roughly similar position in Fedora.

In any case, using the term 'sponsor' or not, Fedora is a community. Not a community-led distro like Debian, Gentoo or openSUSE, but neither is it a closed development thing like RHEL and SLE are. So THAT word, community distribution - fine.

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 12, 2012 4:00 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"Fedora is a community. Not a community-led distro like Debian, Gentoo or openSUSE"

Hold on. How is openSUSE community led while Fedora is not?

Jared Smith steps down as Fedora project leader

Posted Feb 9, 2012 8:27 UTC (Thu) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

Well the thing is the FPL is a full time position, I'm guessing RH employment practices means this person has to work for RH full-time in order to be paid, and RH believe in order for the position to be effective the person should be paid to concentrate on it full-time.