On 04 Jan 2007 17:50:50 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
DZ> There's a reason most successful open source projects have DZ> benevolent dictators and it's not all a democracy. Thanks. This statement also contradicts statements from others at Red Hat. It would be really nice to know just what is actually going to happen.
I haven't seen anything, anywhere, to suggest this is going to be a democracy. The merger is going to be more like opening federally owned land for homesteading. Basically everyone is going to rush out and stake some claims for fertile pieces of unclaimed packaging space. From those individual homesteaders packaging communities will be built, some fated to thrive, and some fated to be ghost towns in a couple of years. Did you know that homesteading was still going on in Alaska till the 1980's? The brave new merged world, is going to be more collaborative, and certainly more supportive of community efforts which are not directly inline with Red Hat directed initiatives. But don't get the wrong idea, there will still be conflicts of interest, and at the end of the day groups of package owners working in teams will be setting the directions for that subgroup of packages and driving development forward in conjunction of the rest of the packaging space. For Gnome, the driver seat in the Fedora space is clearly filled by RedHat engineers so don't expect that to change. The merger makes it possible for new people to drive new initiatives in tangent with current ones. Just don't expect to claim jump existing homesteads, and forcibly change the direction. But for other things, that RedHat doesn't have resources invested in, the merger will definitely matter. For example we all want to see the people who are interested in keeping KDE on Fedora sane have a chance to work on it without undue frustrations. Its no big secret that RedHat is not making an investment of engineering time into KDE, so continuing to have it chained up inside a RedHat internal buildsystem where none of the interested community members can get access to it blocks that. The merger of the infrastructure absolutely is forward progress towards fixing some of the problems with KDE in Fedora. The real question is who is going to end up becoming the benevolent dictators of the KDE space and is there enough community manpower to keep KDE afloat. The merger provides the access, but there will absolutely have to be strong doers to drive the work, instead of just talkers. I certainly expect Rex to be involved because he has some momentum here with his community built packages for KDE. And I also expect people leading Fedora Unity to have a hand in the release engineering aspects of pooping out a KDE-centric installer image since they have already done livecd spins for KDE. Whomever the drivers of KDE packaging and installable media end up being inside the Fedora community, they will absolutely end up making decisions which piss off some KDE users. Conflicts of interest are inevitable, even for packaging drivers not sitting inside the RedHat fenceline. -jef"The merger doesn't so much as change anything with regard to control of existing things. The merger provides access so the fedora project can better support new community initiatives with fedora project infrastructure."spaleta -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
