On 2013-10-07 13:56, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi Jóhann,
I do agree with you that the interaction between Red Hat and Fedora
needs to be clearer, and that currently it is a bit vaguely defined and
thus it gives ground to conspiracy theories and feelings of
disenfranchisement.
That said I think you too need to be open to that Red Hat, like yourself
and any other participant in the Fedora project does so because there is
a sense of self interest. That self interest may wary from enjoyment of
community, to skills building, or to Fedora providing a solution to a
technical problem you have. Red Hat is not investing heavily in Fedora
in terms of infrastructure and development resources just because we as
a company needs a place to spend money, if that was the case I am sure
you would agree we should instead donate the money to the Red Cross or
similar. The reason Red Hat invests in Fedora is because Fedora plays an
important part in both product development and in innovating new
technologies.
So if Fedora ends up not being interesting or useful to you personally
anymore I assume you would leave Fedora behind, the same is true for Red
Hat.
So I think part of the reason we end up having these kinds of argument
it is because for a long time maybe both inside and outside Red Hat
there has been a pretense that Red Hat as a company has no direct
interest in Fedora and that Red Hats resources and contributions to the
project is a given, no matter what. Red Hats involvement in Fedora has
somehow become the unspoken of elephant in the room. Maybe what we need
to do is instead start speaking openly of why Red Hat wants to be
involved with Fedora.
So you mention that some Red Hat employees have bypassed processes, and
I am sure this has happened, but that is a direct consequence of that
Fedora not being a 'random' distro for Red Hat, but an integral part of
our product development. I mean there is no secret that RHEL is built
from Fedora. The tools used to build Fedora overlap and intermingle with
the tools used for building RHEL. So I am not saying that makes
everything ok, but what I want to say is that we need to accept that
these things doesn't happen out of malice, and work together to find
solutions for how they can be handled better going forward in a way that
is mutually beneficial and acceptable to all.
So there are two solutions to the challenge faced with Red Hat and
Fedora. The first option is a decision that Red Hat withdraws from
Fedora and tries to build replacements for Fedora current role in our
product development. Or that the Fedora community and Red Hat agrees
that the current involvement from Red Hat is beneficial to Fedora
overall, despite that it comes with some strings attached and that the
rules of Fedora might at times collide with the practical concerns of
Red Hat, who needs to build products for our customers. And I don't
think (almost) anyone inside or outside Red Hat wants solution 1.
So maybe everyone involved needs to take a deep breath and accept that
there is no 'clean' solution here. There is no rule that can be made
that somehow resolves all the complexity of Fedora both being a
community project and at the same time a core part of the Red Hat
product development workflow and overall market strategy. Sometimes this
weird duality will create friction, but we need to discuss and talk
calmly about these issues and try to find solutions, instead of assuming
bad things of each other.
And often if a change ends up being good or bad is a lot up to the
participants. If you go into something only looking for reasons why it
is bad, then there is a good chance you will end up making it bad, at
least for yourself. And at the same time if you approach something as an
opportunity to do something positive, your chances of doing that is
greatly increased. And often the good solutions is about thinking
outside the box a bit.
And as a sidenote, I think there is a tendency to brand any discussion
about Fedora inside Red Hat as some kind of backroom dealings and
skulduggery, but I think this is silly and unfair. Red Hat like any
other participant sometimes need to figure out what is the Red Hat
position on issues and challenges, a position which might not align with
every Fedora community member or every individual Red Hat employee, and
Red Hat being a company and not an individual can only reach such
positions by discussing them internally first. And to me this is
actually beneficial to the Fedora community as it can provide the
community with a clear sense of what the official company position is on
a given subject, as opposed to trying to somehow extract it from the
buzz of various individual Red Hat employees stating a mix of company
positions and their private opinions.
The real challenge here is to avoid the need to build company positions
lead into a default of doing discussions internally that can be just as
fine be done in the public with full community involvement. This is a
challenge that any project with a big corporate sponsor has and I been
involved with such challenges many times before in jobs prior to Red
Hat. And that is going to be an ongoing challenge for Red Hat and the
Fedora community that I am sure we will need to keep working on for as
long as Red Hat and the Fedora community exists, as it comes out of the
soft challenges like human nature and culture development.
Christian
[cut]
Thanks for an extremely well written reply - after reading this I feel
like I understand what this is all about. I have not had that feeling
before.
That said, please don't top-post: [1]
--alec
[1]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines#If_You_Are_Replying_to_a_Message
--
devel mailing list
devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
