Legacy's Success; Re: why I'm using Ubuntu instead of Fedora ATM

[David Eisenstein]

So many people now seem to want to point to Fedora Legacy and use it as 
a Free-Software Whipping Boy to use its eventual demise as some kind of 
example of failure to point to.  For example,

Luis Villa wrote:
> On 1/3/07, Thorsten Leemhuis <fedora at leemhuis.info> wrote:
>> Hi!
>> A Fedora LTS (two years? maybe the server parts ever three?) now and
>> then (every second or third release?) from a new Fedora Legacy (needs a
>> different name) would IMHO a nice solution.
> 
 > <snip>
 >
> (FWIW, I think it is unreasaonble to expect a true-community distro to
> do real LTS-y stuff- most volunteers don't have the patience to do the
> necessary backporting for the necessary length of time. (See Fedora
> Legacy.) <snip>

As a long-time contributor to and advocate for the Fedora Legacy 
Project, I have to say that, over most of its life, Legacy did not fail 
its mission, if one were to consider Legacy's mission to provide 
security updates to packages that people really cared about.  Why? 
Because it was those packages that folks cared about either (a) that 
squeaked the wheel on the project's email list or (b) that motivated 
people to dig in and get themselves dirty doing onerous, boring, but 
important work for the community of Legacy users.

For the longest time, I personally cared about Fedora Core 1, and also 
cared about the old Red Hat Linux releases 7.3 and 9.0.  The project 
cared too.  Fedora Core 1 came out in Fall of 2003, and was essentially 
supported until May or June of this year -- which is a lifetime of 
two-and-a-half years -- covering security updates for those packages 
that the folks who volunteered wanted or that users squawked loudly for 
(like sendmail, glibc, mozilla, and others).  And what about Red Hat 
Linux 7.3 and 9?  Even longer!  For these three releases, and also 
perhaps FC2, this project was more successful than perhaps the founders 
of Fedora Legacy had hoped or dreamed it would be.

A lot of the work towards the end of the useful life of Fedora Legacy 
was done by one man:  Marc Deslauriers, to which all Fedora Legacy users 
owe a LOT (and I mean a *LOT*) of thank-you's!  He was the one builder 
brave enough to go in and do kernel security updates for the (at one 
time) FIVE Linux releases that Legacy was supporting; and for many other 
packages, Marc did much or most the work of the steps we had in place to 
assure sanity, quality, and security in the creation of updated 
(backported) packages for our end-users.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Marc!!!  Your example is one we 
should all be committed enough to follow and emulate!

And what were Marc and the other contributors paid for this often 
onerous work?  Not one penny.  Often we were paid more complaints than 
compliments.  It became utterly too thankless of a task (and too little 
interest from the community in even doing the QA work we had outlined in 
our documentation) for me to continue, and probably the same goes for 
Marc.  I believe the few who did most of the work finally burned out.

There are still people who want to help out and don't know where to 
begin to help to keep some kind of Legacy alive for the releases they 
care about.  Is this failure?

My assessment is this:  If legacy failed it did so in these areas:
    * Management of contributor resources
    * Devotion of people who knew how to motivate and cause people
      in the contributing community to feel valued, motivated and
      special, and to give a voice to those who cared.
Legacy rarely had meetings, had no board to speak of, and therefore no 
clear mechanism of accountability.

I hope the good folks of Legacy remember Legacy *not* as a failed 
experiment, but as one that lasted longer and did better than folks had 
any right to expect.

	Warm regards,

	David Eisenstein