On 7/30/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Yaakov Nemoy wrote: > > > > > I'm still a little new to the Fedora world, but I keep seeing this > > theme of Fedora used to be Red Hat, and controlled entirely by Red > > Hat. Now it's a community effort that Red Hat has a controlling > > interest in. Red Hat certainly wants this to be a community distro, > > and just five minutes of browsing shows me about 20 different ways I > > can join the community to help out. If i'm Joe Skeptic though, what > > guarantee is there that I'm really helping the community, and not Red > > Hat? > > Why do you need that guarantee? If you want to exclude Red Hat from > benefiting in anyway at all then your contributions has to be restricted > to prevent Red Hat from using it and such a contribution is obviously > non-free and won't be included in Fedora either. Perhaps I'm being misunderstood here. I'm not looking to restrict Red Hat from benefiting, and I'm suprised that was inferred from my comments, since it certainly wouldn't make any sense to say that about the company that pays my paycheck. > A open "community" benefit is also inclusive of Red Hat. Any > contribution under a open license that you contribute can be taken in by > anyone including commercial vendors. If you contribute to any Free and > open source software, Red Hat might be benefiting from it and any > contributions that Red Hat makes benefits everyone including the > competition. This is by design. A social contract isn't going to change > any of this. > > Our objectives (and guarantees) are clearly described in > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives. > > Rahul The Guarantee is a specification of "What is the Fedora Community". Granted it's easy to do Fedora work without having to utilise any Red Hat resources at all, as several people have pointed out to me, but that says nothing other than "Fedora isn't Red Hat." But what is Fedora? Those objectives certainly do go a long way to defining it; somehow I haven't seen that page before. If I were to write a Social Contract, having read them, I might just rip them off wholesale, since they are very good. :) I still believe it would be a nice to have document that describes a community, especially, as I have stated in my blog post, a defining document for an open community. In response to Axel's comments, this applies as well. Red Hat certainly would benefit from such an open community, just as they have done so far within the open community that Fedora is. There certainly is debate on details. It won't ever go away, nor do I want it to, nor do I want a document prevent such a conversation. To sum it up, we all know Fedora is Free and Open, and a Community, let's be able to say so in one more way. I hope this clears up what I'm trying to say :) Yaakov _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
