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Red Hat's Max Spevack On Defending Linux Freedom

Posted by Soulskill on from the swords-may-or-may-not-be-involved dept.

TRNick writes "How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux? TechRadar has an interview with former Fedora project leader Max Spevack to find out how his new role as manager of the community architecture team is designed to help. Quoting: 'About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers. The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.'"

5 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. umm by nomadic · · Score: 0, Troll

    Ever since the libertarian/OSI contingent tried hijacking OSS, the constant cry from the Linux community has been "exploit me!"

  2. touchy feely felt fedoras by yttrstein · · Score: 0, Troll

    "The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued"

    FAIL

    1. Re:touchy feely felt fedoras by yttrstein · · Score: 0, Troll

      Yeah, I could have told the crazy story of early cox/torvalds talent retention as played out by my own role in the years-long tulip driver debacle, highlighting the interplay of politics and innovation using specific examples which also (poetically) draw clean comparison between this interplay both on the developer and on the user side, possibly even successfully explaining a bit about, for example, why Redhat is allowed to call their kernel "linux" despite a decade of mucking about with the headers so much that software of any complexity has to be built specifically for it.

      But one sentence seemed just a bit more efficient with all of that.

  3. Ohh Fedora...have you improved? by bogaboga · · Score: 0, Troll

    '...About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers...'

    I wonder what the community has been up to to-date after having abandoned Red Hat years ago because of RPM hell.

    I understand RPM and the tools that manage it are a lot better than what they used to be in the years gone by.

    Question: Does Red Hat now ship code that just works of am I out of luck when I visit flash rich sites like http://youtube.com/ and java rich sites like http://games.yahoo.com/.

  4. Where is the payback ? by mritunjai · · Score: 0, Troll

    So a lot of fine people give a lot of their very valuable time to get Fedora going - for FREE!, so that RedHat doesn't have to spend a pretty penny hiring people to do that.

    So far so good!

    But then RH has got RHEL, which they won't as much let anybody use for free or make available as free download... Where is the download link for RHEL, Max ? The same RHEL that benefits from community contributions. Instead community is left to only use Fedora!

    And no, don't say CentOS! That's somebody else's effort developed with their time & money! Something that they won't have to do if RH had provided free download of RHEL!

    Again, Where is the download link of RHEL ?

    --
    - mritunjai