On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Or differently: * If FESCo had decided to allow "non-free firmware", they would have been shot by the community and/or RH, like the community/RH did on similar occasions.
I think if any group of people within Fedora decided they wanted to drastically revers the "freedom" stance of the distribution, they would find themselves shot down by the Fedora Board, and it wouldn't be some sort of 5-4 RH/community split vote.
* FESCo can't decide on legal/patent matters, because they lack the knowledge. One escape would have been RH to provide them with legal advisors, or some volunteers to appear, but ... neither happened :(
Legal issues are one of the places where Red Hat's sponsorship of Fedora comes in. Red Hat's lawyers are Fedora's lawyers. There are plusses and minuses to that arrangement. Part of the nature of the legal work requires a lot of the interaction to flow through Red Hat people, since the lawyers need to be very careful about what they say on public mailing lists.
* FESCo can decide on "packaging matters" despite they lack the detailed knowledge, because FPC provides them with "recommendations".
And who's on the packaging committee? Looks to me like it's 4 RH folks and 5 community folks, and that's only because Toshio just got hired by Red Hat. The packaging committee is given significant autonomy. I can't remember an example of the Fedora Board meddling, changing, or telling the Packaging Committee what to do. Maybe Fesco has a more contentious relationship with the Packaging committee that I'm not aware of.
* FESCo could decide on "tactical matters/executive jobs" (e.g. fixing release dates, establishing committees, deciding on mailing lists), because this doesn't require detailed knowledge, ... in many cases this doesn't happen, because other "leaders" overruled them.
I think my initial post at the top of this thread discusses a new, more open, way for this sort of stuff to be handled.
I don't see what they could decide what FAB can't and vice-versa. Both widely overlap. There is one difference: FESCo was supposed to be elected, while FAB is "RH proclaimed".
FAB??? There's no membership list for FAB. It's "whoever joins this mailing list, writes something, and hits send." You make your own reputation, and that will determine how much "authority" an email you send to Fedora Advisory Board has, and how much the various "leaders" who read FAB take stock in what you say.
I think of FAB as a clearing house for people who have leadership positions throughout Fedora, to talk about higher-level issues in a single place. The goal of giving greater empowerment to FESCO is, as Axel put in one email, to give some level of separation between the strategic decision making from the day to day engineering decision making.
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