On 05/31/2012 12:39 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 08:29:30AM +0200, Gianluca Sforna wrote:
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Nicu Buculei<nicu_fedora@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But I think we all agree the linked article is really bad written and it
would he useful to "help" those news sources to improve their reporting.
In addition, I'd love to hear some sort of official word about the
"Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that
eventually end up in the firm's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
operating system" part. I mean, is this a concept Red Hat is actively
marketing?
If so, as an ambassador I'd love to know it because I am constantly
fighting against this "Fedora is a beta (or worse) level package and
its users are just Red Hat's guinea pigs" attitude in press, blogs and
users of other distros.
If that's not true, it would be really useful to have some words from
a @redhat spokesperson to back a different point of view on the Red
Hat/Fedora relationship
There's a big difference between "Fedora is a beta and users are
guinea pigs," and "Fedora is a place where *any contributor* can work
on new technical features and put them in front of millions of users
as part of a free and open source software development process." Red
Hat is only part of our community and we've had plenty of other
contributors over the years put new software into the distribution for
people to use.
Being the proving ground for new technology that might be in a future
RHEL release is only one function of the Fedora Project. Of course
that function is quite important to Red Hat, and a reason why Red Hat
continues to put substantail resources into Fedora. But it's not the
only thing the Fedora Project does, and as you know lots of
contributors have their own reasons to participate as well.
Here we come to one of the core issues of Red Hat vs The Fedora
community as in we ( the community ) do not view RHEL release being one
function of the Fedora Project.
Red Hat certainly believes it to be one of the function the project
however we ( the community ) certainly don't nor should we as an project
allow any sponsor Red Hat or otherwise have any influence either
directly or indirectly of the project and it's direction.
Another way to think about it is like this... Any dedicated
contributor has the potential to contribute features and technology to
integrate into Fedora the distribution, just like Red Hat does. It
just so happens that Red Hat dedicates people, time, and money to
that creation and integration effort, and as a result each release has
lots of innovative new features.
So in essence here you say that all innovation that happen in the
project is all thanks to Red Hat and the community members time is
worthless compared to the time and money Red Hat sponsor the project with.
I would say that the above is a rather interesting response from a
former project leader then again if memory serves me correct you
actually did call Fedora "Beta" in one of the Red Hat summit during you
time as our project leader so I cant say that I'm surprised by this.
As the Fedora community (and indeed
the wider FOSS community) essentially "elects" the best stuff over
time, Red Hat can use that crowd wisdom to help decide what pieces
make the most sense for its enterprise product. Any other contributor
can do the same thing, at whatever scale makes sense for them.
True but at the same time no other *sponsor* is allowed to essentially
*sponsor* the project as you as the former projects leader are well
aware of.
In the end from the communities point of view Red Hat is a sponsor no
more no less, we Fedora have our own leadership, our own developer base
and own priorities Fedora goes it's own way regardless of Red Hat or
RHEL or any other contributor,sponsor or distribution downstream to us
thinks.
Red Hat can continue to advertise to it's partners that we are some kind
of testing/proving ground for RHEL and directly or indirectly try to
influence the direction of the project and we the community will
continue to do our best to shake that stamp off the project and stay
firm at the steering wheel and try to prevent Red Hat from doing so and
we will continue to do so until either one of the two possible outcome
on how that will end will come to pass.
JBG
--
marketing mailing list
marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
