Revealed: How Fedora And The Community Interact

bakwas_internet writes "Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny message in form of a irc chat log, revealing how Fedora and the Community Interact, to the development discussions mailing list related to Fedora Core.The story also appeared at lwn.net and OSnews."

Comments

Mark your diaries: May 17th

[reality-bytes]

Okay, only mark your diaries if you are Fedora inclined like me ;)

Fedora Core 2, if on schedule (which, AFAIK it still is) is due to be available from mirrors on the 17th of this month.

The actual distibution is sceduled to start going out to the mirrors on the 14th but I think the mirrors will be requested to keep it locked till the 17th.

If they don't make it to the release deadline it may lead to some IRC antics rather like the ones mentioned in the article.

Here it is....in color :-D

[tvh2k]

Color HTML-ized version

Re:Can we PLEASE get some decent Mods?

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't reverse them. Perhaps you should read the article again, and note how most speakers are directing what they say (a common IRC tactic). When it was copied and pasted and posted, the browser is seeing the nick in the angle brackets and thinking "Oh! Mis-formed HTML! I'll ignore that!" and not showing the nick of the speaker. A common mistake. Specifying "Code" as the post type for the slashdot comment allows the nick to remain:

<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what can we do to help with Red Hat Project?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: didn't we always do that?
<rh_sales> hey, all, if you really want a stable system, don't use
fedora project. It will eat your brane. Buy RHEL instead.
<rh_dev> rh_sales: stfu
--- rh_pr removes voice from rh_sales

Two purposes of RH Fedora

[Ben Escoto]

It may be useful to distinguish two ways in which Fedora was supposed to be different from the previous series.

1. Fedora was supposed to strike a different compromise between being stable and being up-to-date. It should come out frequently, try new and exciting features, and have the latest versions of everything.
2. The community was supposed to have more of a say in the overall direction. With RH Linux, the company decided which packages would be included in the main distribution and what the defaults would be. With Fedora US (and thus presumably RH Fedora) the users submit and check packages and decide overall direction.
   

RH Fedora is a success with respect to #1, but has failed at #2. I run RH Fedora and it seems to be a reasonable stable and up-to-date distro, and tries out features like SELinux. As other people have pointed out, FC2 is on target and should be released soon.

But as far as #2 goes it is a failure. There has been no integration with Fedora.us and, as the dialogue shows, RH still decides on all the packages and defaults in a relatively closed way.

Some people have asked why RH, being a for-profit company, could open up development. There seems to be an obvious answer: so the community could help it more. RedHat could still exercise a high degree of control as long as it contributed heavily to the new community project. That's why many people were excited at the new structure---it implied that RH was still committed to develop the distribution, but would make sure that the community was heavily involved as well. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth their effort to "open it up."

Re:all distributions suck

[love2hateMS]

I've been using Fedora since day 1, and quite honestly I love it. I haven't played with the pre-release Core 2 stuff yet, but Core 1 runs like a dream.

As far as the interaction with Red Hat, think about it this way: What other distro allows you to post a message to a mailing list and get an answer from Alan Cox himself? Red Hat genuinely interacts with the users, listens to them and tries to help them.

I can't even count how many times I have seen the Red Hat guys help users who clearly aren't running any of their Enterprise products.