[Ambassadors] Red Hat's investments (was Re: Going passive)

[Miloslav Trmač]

Christoph Wickert píše v St 10. 11. 2010 v 17:10 +0100: 
> Am Dienstag, den 09.11.2010, 23:13 +0100 schrieb Henrik Nordström:
> 
> > And I fail to see how it's really relevant what the balance is.
> 
> My point was: The amount of work from the community is continuously
> rising, the investments by Red Hat - ether by money or manpower - are
> not.
As a Red Hat employee, I can see that is simply not true; but the
contribution is probably not in the areas you are most interested in -
it's development, not maintenance of and enlarging the Fedora community.

> > If RedHat is using their parental relation to Fedora to enforce certain
> > directions within Fedora against the general will of the community then
> > I would be worried, but I have not seen any significant signs of this.
> 
> You haven't? Ok, let me show you some signs: 
I'm afraid I'm not involved enough to be able to understand what's
happening in most of the cases - but let me point out a few things.

> 11. We had brilliant community architect in EMEA and his job is
>         vacant for more than a year now. We are told that somebody new
>         is to come (at least for 20hrs/week), but so far, nothing has
>         happened. 
The majority of growth in Red Hat contributions is developers and QA
(AFAIK for a long time there was only one person working full-time on
Fedora QA, now the situation is much different); paradoxically asking
Red Hat for more manpower in community organizing implicitly means that
Red Hat should have _more_ control of Fedora.

>     13. 2 Red Hat employees who never contributed to Fedora were
>         suddenly given commit access to more than 800 packages without
>         previous notification to the package owners. Thanks God this was
>         revoked.
>     14. Other package owners got a formal letter from Red Hat that they
>         had to hand some of their packages over to Red Hat employees as
>         they were to become part of RHEL6.
I'm afraid mistakes happen.  Not everybody knowledgeable about Linux
programming is knowledgeable about the open source community; in fact
the number of mistakes is directly caused by the large growth in the
number of people Red Hat pays to work on Fedora.  Would you really
prefer a Fedora community with the Red Hat of 2003 if it meant no
mistakes would happen?


>     20. We have more and more red tape that makes live hard for our
>         contributors.
Yeah, I don't like it either.  What probably happens is that the Red Hat
paid developers, who are supposed to write code, wade through the red
tape because they have to, but they don't become vocal in the community
about changing the processes because that is not in their job
description.

Given the size of the Fedora community, the time required to participate
in the governing bodies is substantial.  So when a contributors see
unnecessary red tape, they have to choose between making the
contribution for which they joined Fedora in the first place, and
between steering the governing bodies.  I can perfectly see that this is
rather frustrating, but I'm afraid I don't know how to fix it.
Mirek