Fedora Holds Summit To Map Its Future 92
lisah writes "Last month members of the Fedora community met for a three-day summit (wiki here) designed to chart a course for future version releases as well as to plan other Fedora projects. Team members say they want to leverage the enthusiasm of a community that has demonstrated a willingness to develop Fedora Extras (add-on features to the Core package) and support Fedora Legacy (past releases). Red Hat's community development manager, Greg DeKoenigsberg, said, 'Community contributors have proven conclusively over the past 18 months that they can build packages every bit as well as Red Hat engineers — better, in some cases.' In addition to creating several proposals that will be introduced the the community for input and feedback, the summit also gave rise to the newly-created position of Fedora Infrastructure Leader." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Fedora is important (Score:5, Insightful)
No mention of users (Score:5, Insightful)
High time to stop duplication (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine how much more work could be done to a package manager if every distro was using the same. Imagine how good OpenOffice and KOffice could have been if there were not 200 other Open Source alternatives. I am glad to hear about efforts to unify KDE and Gnome. We need to focus on something similar for a lot of other applications too. And this should be one of the top most priorities for Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu/Debian teams.
Re:No mention of users (Score:4, Insightful)
While that's true to an extent, there are two things that make open source software different from the norm:
1. Many developers write the software for their own use (rather than for money)
2. Users can and do change the software to better suit them
This is what blurs the line between developers and users. Of course, both of these are also reasons why developers can and do ignore users' requests, and get away with it.
OSS and natural selection... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can probably point out tons and tons of failed forks (I believe mplayer has had a few unsuccessful forking attempts). They happen all the time.
A shining example of a 'fork' like endeavor coexisting with the original is Debian and Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a set of technical and marketing goals that didn't mesh perfectly with Debian. Ubuntu was justified and the community has greatly accepted it. Meanwhile Debian has not really lost much in its userbase (most Ubuntu users come from RPM based distros rather than Debian) because the concepts Debian hold as important still matter.
And sometimes fork reflect the need to meaningfully continue a project that has for all intents and purposes lost touch. Xorg is a fork of XFree86 that has effectively killed off the original. They still twitch, but they've even taking down their ultimately embarassingly list of distros that still supported them (generally by not having updated yet rather than a concious future decision). The breaking point was a licensing technicality, but it's clear that XFree86 had technical problems as well in adopting new graphical features.
Hell, linux itself is spiritually (not technically) a fork of minix. The basic point is simple, projects by and large once established tend not to do revolutionary new things as the people at the head are heading basically where they meant to go. Forking is a logical way for revolutionary change to happen and the userbase decides the fate of the original and new.
Re:No mention of users (Score:3, Insightful)
Transparency needed to come first, and that's way better now. Fedora's governance was non-obvious, with a different Leader of the Week handing down Red Hat fiats. Now they seem to be consciously trying to expose more of the decision making process, and the leadership team seems more stable and active. This is all to the good.
I'd still like to see more voices on the advisory board that take the user point of view. You'll get some swinging dick who says "Hey let's just track all Fedora users so we know how many there are, and who cares if some people whine about privacy." And nobody is there to say: "Whoa there cowboy, we're not Microsoft yet."
But if they're moving towards more open governance as it appears, I think they'll end up hearing out their users' concerns more as a consequence.
Re:High time to stop duplication (Score:1, Insightful)
They may value the learning experience or the skills they develop. They may value the recognition. They may value the experience of being involved in a volunteer group effort. They may value the fact that some annoying bug is finally fixed. Perhaps they simply value the feeling they get by helping out.
So let's get to the point. The question is not "why aren't these programmers working on some other project instead of duplicating effort?" The question is "why should these programmers work on some other project valued by others (or some arbitrary group such as majority opinion) instead of the project they value for themselves?"
I think we all know the answer: Because programming for YOUR project isn't what makes them happy, and making themselves happy, in whatever form that may take, is exactly why they program.
Re:Fedora is important (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because Red Hat has never contributed anything to the community:
http://sources.redhat.com/projects.html [redhat.com]
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions [fedoraproject.org]
Fedora isn't perfect, and RH did make - IMO - do a poor job of transitioning from the "old" RHL series to Fedora, but to suggest that they don't
contribute anything to Linux and OSS is just ridiculous.
Re:Maybe, but it needs improving. (Score:3, Insightful)
Slower? Yeah - you don't know if any of those patches touch the configure options, so you've got to get part-way into an RPM build, break out, find the source directory, find the options, go back to the SPEC directory, find the
Sure, I went through dependency hell with tarballs. The "golden era" was more brass-plated than gold. The number of problems was probably comparable, the only package I ever recall swearing at to this degree was X11R4. (Do you know how long that takes to build on a 386SX-16? Do you know what it is like to build the entire distribution tree, only to discover that due to some obscene/obscure bug when on the Linux architecture that random portions will mis-configure, mis-compile, barf on GCC or implode except when run on a non-existant resolution that causes the monitor to give a high-pitched scream and run down the street?)
Nonetheless, with the exception of X, most problems were quick to discover and quick to fix. (In fact, I have yet to get X to compile correctly with any serious platform-specific optimizations. I won't forgive the Berlin/Fresco group for abandoning their alternative GUI.) The same cannot be said of exactly the same programs managed through