Appointment of Board Members.

seth vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Mon Aug 16 18:32:34 UTC 2010


On Mon, 2010-08-16 at 23:45 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 08/16/2010 12:20 AM, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > Not that I have any say in this but I know I'd prefer that the FPL have
> > to:
> >
> >  1) Spend full time on Fedora
> >  2) Not starve in the process
> >
> > Seems like that's an implied mandate to be a paid position if nothing
> > else.
> 
> I would like those things too but it is a balance.  Oracle taking over
> Sun and screwing up things (Oracle lawsuit against Google,  Shutting
> down Postgres test servers, OpenSolaris etc) has been pushing me towards
> advocating more diversity and less centralized control.
> 

Okay, now I'm good and confused.

Let's say red hat gets purchased by $evil_company. What exactly is it
you think fedora's going to be able to do?

A huge number of developers/maintainers on crit-path are going to be
either:
1. allowed to do what they are doing now
2. not allowed to do what they are doing now

If it is the first then fedora continues as-is and it has nothing to do
with who is in control of the board.

If it is the second then fedora is 'done', if only b/c all of our releng
and central mail(bastion) infrastructure is owned by red hat and no
matter who is on the board, that ownership of resources doesn't change.

I just don't see the point in worrying about it. If red hat gets
consumed and the consuming company is $evil then fedora is, for all
intents and purposes, over. The devels working for red hat or not
working for red hat will just pick up whatever pieces they have and
eithr rename/relocate or they will not.

If it was me, and I had to pick up the pieces, I wouldn't even try to
keep the fedora name (not that the trademark ownership would let you
anyway). There's a small amount of brand-recognition advantage and a lot
of legacy crap to carry over with.

So what's the point in de-centralizing it? What do we get out of it?

-sv




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