Fedora's way forward
To the Fedora community:
The first day of FUDCon is now complete. 78 members of our community
spent the entire day working on many aspects of Fedora. It was an
incredibly productive day, and we expect the rest of the weekend to be
more of the same.
Over 150 people will be attending FUDCon on Saturday, which will be a
more traditional day of presentations, sessions, etc. The opening talk
will be my yearly "State of Fedora" speech.
I believe it will be videotaped and up on the internet eventually, but I
want to take a few minutes to share some of the details with you.
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Two years ago, Matthew Szulik (Red Hat's CEO) asked me to be the Fedora
Project Leader, and I was flattered and humbled by the opportunity. It
has been one of the coolest jobs that a person could have.
I started about one month before Fedora Core 5 was released. Only a few
people within the Fedora community knew me -- I had been at Red Hat for
a year and a half at that point in the Red Hat Network group, but I had
not done much with Fedora other than simply *use* the distro.
You, the community, were very fair with me, incredibly accepting, and
you gave me the opportunity to earn your respect and to influence the
direction of Fedora. You trusted me, you gave me a chance, and I
appreciate that more deeply than I can express. I hope I have not
disappointed you.
Now we're a few months past the Fedora 8 release, and the time has come
for me to hand off the Fedora Project Leader role, though I hope to
remain involved in Fedora and Red Hat's community efforts.
That's all I want to say about me. Now I want to talk about the larger
Fedora Project, and introduce a few new leaders.
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Fedora has come a long way in the last few years. Red Hat has committed
more resources to Fedora, enabling us to grow the Fedora team when the
opportunity came up to hire some of the true stars of the Fedora
community. This in turn allows the core group of Fedora folks within
Red Hat to be more effective leaders within the community, because a
focus on community building is the most important thing that we do.
The people who are lucky enough to get paid to spend their workdays 100%
on Fedora each have a responsibility to be community builders first, and
individual contributors second. A community that does not grow and that
does not develop new leadership will stagnate. Red Hat's investments in
the Fedora community help to prevent this.
Continuing to grow our community, lower barriers to entry, and develop
new leaders will remain a top priority for Fedora.
We've also made tremendous changes to Fedora at a technical level in the
past two years -- merging Core and Extras into a single repository,
working with Red Hat and community engineers to produce a new build
system for Fedora, and new tools that allow users to create fully
customized versions of Fedora and deliver Fedora in new ways (Live USB,
for example).
Additionally, the work that we have done with the branding, marketing,
and press folks both inside Red Hat and in our community has led to a
resurgence in the Fedora brand. Fedora enjoys an identity as an
independent Linux distribution that focuses on innovation, freedom, and
community, all while still serving as the upstream for RHEL.
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I am very pleased to announce that Paul Frields has accepted a job with
Red Hat, and he will be taking over as Fedora Project Leader in
February.
Many of you already know Paul. He has been part of the Fedora community
since 2003, not long after the Red Hat Linux Project officially merged
with the original Fedora.us. Paul has worked with Fedora's
documentation, packaging, marketing, news, and artwork teams. He also
served as one of the inaugural members of the Fedora Project Board.
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Additionally, Jack Aboutboul has recently transferred into a full-time
job in Red Hat's marketing and brand communications group. We have
asked Jack to take an active leadership role in Fedora marketing,
community building, and Ambassadors.
Jack was one of the original Fedora Ambassadors in our community. He
has organized FUDCons, and he has been promoting Fedora with his endless
energy and enthusiasm for several years now. While Jack was in school,
he worked for Red Hat as an intern and part-time employee, and we are
very happy to bring Jack on full-time to continue building the Fedora
community.
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I have rambled on now for far longer than I planned to. I shall simply
say that it has been an honor to be the Fedora Project Leader.
Thank you.
--Max