Fedora News Updates #4

On Wednesday, January 21st at 5:30PM, after hours at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York City, some members of the Fedora Community met up for a Birds of a Feather session. The event was attended by both developers and users alike, with the great Mr. Michael Tiemann, CTO of Red Hat, gracing the session with his presence. The event was kindly catered by a community members with Krispy Kreme doughnuts and various drinks. Many topics were discussed and overall a great time was had by all.

The first topic to be discussed, to the dismay of many attending, was about trademark issues and Red Hat's intentions as far as the Fedora name was concerned. The questions were quickly quashed by non other than Mr. Tiemann himself as he allayed everyone's fears. Mr. Tiemann assured everyone that Red Hat has a real vested interest in seeing Fedora succeed and that many people are backing the project.

One of the next topics to come up was about the development road map for the GNOME project as it relates to the Mono framework. Certain community members were concerned about the parts that Mono will play in upcoming GNOME releases. We have already begun to see many GNOME applications being written using Mono and at some point in time, if Mono becomes a big enough part of GNOME, there may possibly be patent issues to worry about. This question was fielded by Havoc Pennington, with the response of "it's a flame war waiting to happen."

The next major topic of discussion, which happened to take up a majority of the time of the session was regarding the willingness of the project to accept outside work by developers. Some of the community developers were eager to find out when and how their contributions would make it in to Fedora. Many were also interested as to when an infrastructure would be set up to facilitate and encourage community development. A number of people on the inside tried their hand at this one, but Tom "Spot" Callaway really ran away with the prize with interesting points about both human and technical infrastructure. Regarding human infrastructure he said "key roles need to be defined, then people need to be put in these roles. It is vital that not all of these people work for Red Hat. There needs to be a clear hierarchy, with checks and balances established to try and ensure a smooth structure. The infrastructure needs to be the core component for major decision/policy making. Basically, these people need to make the hard decisions so that Fedora can move forward. Anyone can suggest policy, but these people need to vote." With regard to technical infrastructure, the ideas that were brought up were the opening of the bugzilla process, a system for package submission and moderation/rating system, better QA policies and ultimately the transformation of fedora.redhat.com into a Fedora Project portal.

In conclusion, the session was filled with food, fun, great debate and most important, the feeling of community. A great time was had by all those who attended and much good came out of the session. We would like to thank the following people for making the session possible and a huge success: Natalie Vercaturen of IDG for allocating the room for the expo. Jeremy Hogan for his continuous support. Mr. Michael Tiemann, for his faith and patience with the project. Havoc Pennington, Brent Fox, Garrett LeSage, Tammy Fox and Tom Callaway. The Linuxquestions.org and LTSP crews. Jack "greendisease" Aboutboul for organizing and catering the session. Last but not least, Red Hat, Inc. for creating such a wonderful project and supporting the community and the spirit of Open Source. See you in San Francisco.