"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Jeffrey Ollie]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:33 AM, Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 9:40 AM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Is it in the board's purview to "lead" the project by singling out
>>> technologies it wants to move along over the next few releases?
>>
>> Yes.  Fedora has limited resources. That means that someone needs to
>> prioritize the use of those resources.  As a corollary to that it may
>> mean that some projects/ideas may be denied resources.
>
> to be fair the board has no power to allocate resources. The board has NO
> control over, afaict, ANY of the development teams: kernel, desktop,
> virtualization.
>
> Not sure what difference any of this discussion will make until that weird
> split of power vs responsibility is resolved.

Hmm true.  When the project is composed of mostly volunteers, no one
can really allocate manpower resources like you could in a business.
But what about the other resources available to the Fedora Project,
like the servers that run the infrastructure and the money given to
the project by Red Hat?  Aren't those under the ultimate control of
the board?  If a developer or other project member starts going off in
a direction that the board feels is detrimental to the project can't
they deny him/her access to those resources?

Hopefully controlling developers though such a negative method is
never necessary.  Hopefully the board would be able to persuade
developers that the board's vision is the correct one and would then
work together with everyone else to accomplish that vision.

Of course, this presupposes that the board HAS a vision.

-- 
Jeff Ollie