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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."
Mike Chambers wrote:
/msg me
I think Red Hat went out on a limb and went ahead and told everyone what
was going to happen with changing to Fedora and letting us in on how
this thing will work in general.
Let me, err, relay how things are looking from outside of RH in the format everyone will understand...
--- BEGIN IRC LOG ---
<rh_pr> We are announcing Red Hat Project! A community-based
distribution!
<oss_crowd> rh_pr: Neat.
<rh_dev> rh_pr: Uh... I'm not ready.
* rh_pr is away: promoting rhel
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: what do we do?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: I'm not sure.
<rh_legal> rh_dev: don't do anything until I say it's ok.
<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
<fedora_us> hey, all, check out our neat community-driven system for
red hat development
<oss_crowd> fedora_us: ooooh!
<rh_pr> fedora_us: I like your name
--- fedora_rh joined the channel
<rh_legal> much better
<rh_pr> We are announcing Fedora Project! A community-driven
distribution!
<oss_crowd> rh_pr: Neat!
* fedora_rh waves
<fedora_us> I'm not dead yet.
<fedora_rh> fedora_us: don't confuse things.
<fedora_us> fedora_rh: does this mean we're merging?
<fedora_rh> fedora_us: maybe
<rh_legal> fedora_rh: don't do anything until I say it's ok.
--- fedora_us joined #limbo
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: so, what can we do to help?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: uh... file bugs and help test things.
<oss_crowd> sigh... didn't we always do that?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: I know, let's all go in the circle and say our
names.
* oss_crowd goes in the circle and says their names. This
lasts several months.
<fedora_rh> So, there will be the following features in the next
release of Fedora Core.
<oss_crowd> Uh... Hold on. Who gets to decide?
<rh_sales> We do. That stuff will be neato for RHEL-4.
<oss_crowd> MMkay, then. When do _we_ get to suggest things?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: feel free to talk among yourselves.
* oss_crowd talks among themselves about new features.
<fedora_rh> btw, feature X will be disabled in the release.
* oss_crowd glares at fedora_rh
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: nice of you to tell us while we were sitting
here talking.
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: sorry, it's just not happening.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: when do we get to decide what's happening?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: Dunno, I'll ask rh_legal
<rh_legal> rh_dev: ugh,
<rh_sales> rh_dev: let's not do anything rash here.
* fedora_us gets tired of sitting in #limbo
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: I want to see more of the "community" part of
the whole "community-based" thing
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: how about at least a publicly accessible CVS/SVN
tree?
<rh_dev> oss_crowd: Yeah, that would be cool.
<oss_crowd> rh_dev: finally, some movement. When is that going to be
up?
* rh_dev is away: talking to rh_legal
* oss_crowd tries to occupy themselves and do things like
fedoranews and fedorapeople.
<oss_crowd> Uh... ping?
<fedora_uh> oss_crowd: what's up?
<oss_crowd> fedora_rh: We're feeling kinda useless. What exactly is our
role, again?
<fedora_rh> oss_crowd: well, it would be really helpful if you could
test some things and file the bugs.
If RHEL can help this guy's copy and paste skills, then I'm sold.
1. With 1-2 new stories an hour, even your 1 in 10 figure means 3-4 tech news stories a day. There's just not that much tech news out there each day. Even check out http://www.cnn.com/tech/, sometimes they don't update that page for days. Feature stories and "filler" are a reality, so deal.
2. The tagline is "New for news, stuff that matters". If you're going to make a point with it, at least get it right.
3. If you don't like the stories, submit better ones. Remember, 99.9% of the stories are user-submitted, so the solution is in your hands!
This is exactly why I love Debian: it's the community. Yes, many Red Hat employees are deeply involved in the GNU/Linux community; but it seems to work both ways with Debian: the members of the GNU/Linux community affect Debian's direction substantially.
Red Hat ships its software as a "complete package", so to speak. You buy the CDs and put them in and install, and that's what you've got. Debian is much more of a "work in progress" that you can actually become a part of. You download the 50-meg install image which fetches a snapshot of what the developers are working on. That seems much more honest to me, because GNU/Linux is a work in progress and always will be.
Of course, some of Debian's politics suck. I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops because stable is just so damned old that it's almost useless. A six-month release schedule like GNOME's would solve this, IMO.