Red Hat's Max Spevack On Defending Linux Freedom 91
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.'"
Red Hat (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ohh Fedora...have you improved? (Score:4, Informative)
You should give Fedora 9 a try, it has out of the box swfdec (which is 95% there in terms of flash, should not be long before it is 100%) and OpenJDK (which is 100% there in terms of Java support; the only issue I ever had was an applet that actually tried making direct sound system calls to the Windows sound system, no joke, which one can hardly blame OpenJDK for). I was skeptical at first, as these were not too solid in Fedora 8, but after 6 months of using them, I am thoroughly impressed. Also, assuming you are not on an unsupported configuration, you can always add the yum repo. for Adobe's proprietary flash, which is a pretty basic RPM install that integrates with the automated updates.
Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used (Score:5, Informative)
Well first of all, Red Hat employs a lot of Fedora developers (like me), which is certainly worth a lot more than a lousy coffee cup.
Secondly your premise is wrong: Fedora developers - those not employed by Red Hat - keep working on Fedora despite not getting any rewards. Why is that? Well, some work for reputation instead of money. A large number work for other companies who benefit from the mutual sharing of code. The vast majority, however, don't work for / on Fedora at all. They work for Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache, and a thousand other upstream projects, and we in Fedora and Red Hat package up those projects. (Packaging, while an important activity, is only a tiny part of the process of writing free software).
Rich.
a bit of context (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking "I'll just check Slashdot and see what's new today" and all of a sudden I saw my name on the front page. I thought "what on earth am I doing on the front page of Slashdot? I haven't given an interview in quite a long time."
I realized that the interview was from Linux Format UK (at the end of the article), and checking my records, I can see that it a summary of an interview I gave at LUG Radio Live back in July.
Re:The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields) (Score:3, Informative)
Expecting volunteers to carry 2/3 of the load for Fedora seems a bit much.
We don't *expect* volunteers to maintain 2/3 of Fedora's packages. That is just what the numbers ended up being, and they flux often as different people either adopt or orphan packages depending on their circumstances.
Re:The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields) (Score:3, Informative)
A better question would start with some research to understand who the Fedora developers are and who pays them if they are paid. Basing a question on the same tired falsehood that open source developers are unpaid geeks living in their parent's basements is rather tired and dated.
If the linux kernel contributions are any clue only 15% of contributors are unpaid. And I'm sure they have their reasons for contributing which go beyond simply making a buck.
linuxkerneldevelopment [linuxfoundation.org]
Re:Where is the payback ? (Score:3, Informative)
Again, Where is the download link of RHEL ?
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise [redhat.com]