Feedback

[Eris Gaia]

Hello again! Sorry, it's been a very busy month. From my initial observations I have decided to move on from this project, but I wanted to share some feedback with you before I go.

After spending some time getting to know Fedora and the community I came to see that not only do Red Hat employees contribute to the project - which is known and expected - but some of them appear to be taking leading positions. This gives the impression that a private company has implicit control over the direction of Fedora, with employees assigned to work on the project as part of their work responsibility. I hope that my impression is wrong, because in my opinion it would not be an exaggeration to claim that implicit control is implicit ownership.

Let's assume in the best case scenario that Red Hat employees are volunteering of their own volition, completely outside of the realm of the responsibilities agreed upon with their employer. This amounts to unpaid work provided to Red Hat indirectly by their employees. More importantly, however, there would still be a division between paid and unpaid volunteers. In any case, volunteers that are not employed by Red Hat are still contributing their work to a private company. Thus, they are contributing to their profits, which subsequently influences the salaries of those volunteers that are employed directly by Red Hat.

To put it bluntly, from my analysis this could amount to an exploitative relationship on multiple levels - between paid and unpaid volunteers, between Red Hat and its employees, and between Red Hat and all volunteers. I may have misconceived the situation, but I am suggesting that it is Fedora's (and also Red Hat's) responsibility to clear this misconception in a public and easily accessible manner and to make the nature of this relationship more explicit to prospective volunteers so that they not be misled or even potentially exploited. It may even be helpful going forward to define new terms such as POSS (Private and open-source software) so that the greater open-source community can become conscious of - and possess greater discernment as to - whether or not they are being taken advantage of.

Thank you for your time. Peace!

[Ankur Sinha]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2022 10:08:57 -0000, Eris Gaia wrote:
> Hello again! Sorry, it's been a very busy month. From my initial
> observations I have decided to move on from this project, but I wanted
> to share some feedback with you before I go.

Thanks very much for your feedback.

I've replied to your ticket where you posted this intially, and I'll
paste my response here also for everyone's convenience:

https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Welcome-to-Fedora/issue/206

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There are very few positions where someone from Red Hat is appointed and
there is good reason to do so. You can see the ones appointed to the
Council here:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/#_appointed_leadership_position...

Apart from this, all Red Hat employees that work on Fedora are
considered volunteers and we are all equals in the community. All bodies
(FESCo/Mindshare/CommOps) have elections where any one from the
community can nominate themselves. For eg:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/FESCo_election_policy/#_candidate...

The reason why you see Red Hat employees in leadership positions is
because their jobs at Red Hat are closely linked to the Fedora
life-cycle and this allows them to spend more time on Fedora related
tasks than us volunteers---perhaps because they are in-charge of the
infrastructure (the CPE team, which looks after Fedora/CentOS/other
infrastructure which we all share) or because their Red Hat roles are
dependent on software in Fedora (because stuff lands in Fedora before it
trickles down to RHEL etc.). Indeed, their managers may set up their
tasks in such a way that they are able to spend time on Fedora tasks.
That's perfectly fine. There are other volunteers in the community where
their managers will allow them to work on Fedora tasks because the
corporation may be using Fedora in some way.

Most of us at the Join SIG have day-jobs that are not directly related
to Fedora. So we can only find time after our work hours and our
personal responsibilities to work on Fedora tasks. This is usually only
a few hours a day (if we're lucky!). So, I'm personally quite happy to
let someone with more time on their hands lead initiatives---we try very
hard not to let ourselves lick cookies. I wish my job was more closely
related to Fedora so that my manager would let me set time aside to work
on Fedora tasks, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

You're not the first person to worry about this, and I'm sure you won't
be the last. However, all our discussions and decision making happen in
the open (see the devel list where all features landing in Fedora are
discussed). We "default to open". So anytime one feels there's an undue
influence from an organisation that is not in the best interests of the
Fedora community, it is immediately flagged and dealt with openly in the
community

Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, and Fedora Linux remains upstream for
CentOS and Red Hat, so it is expected that lots of software that is
intended to finally land in these downstream distributions will land in
Fedora first, but they must all go through the same process as all other
software. No package gets special treatment.

Another important feature of the community is that we assume best
intentions. That does not mean that we are naive, but we don't suspect
each other of malice by default.

Lastly, contribution is completely voluntary. We contribute because we
get something in return (whatever that is---the OS, or just satisfaction
from contributing to FOSS). Anyone that has reservations can contribute
to other FOSS projects. That's perfectly fine too.

I will now close this ticket.

Cheers, and all the best.