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

[Henrik Nordström]

ons 2010-11-10 klockan 17:10 +0100 skrev Christoph Wickert:

>      1. Fedora EMEA e.V. is being closed down.

I know, and is covered by what I said.

>      3. Long time contributors like Gerold are stepping down. 
>      4. Others are not officially stepping down but simply resigning. I
>         don't want to name any names. 
>      5. Several Fedora community websites were close down.
>      6. We hardly have any community members that are willing to run for
>         the board or Fesco. 
>      7. We have nobody to coordinate the elections. 
>      8. We nearly had no FUDCon in EMEA this year. 
>      9. Fedora 14 has less features than any other Fedora release. 

And all the above is by default the error of RedHat? 

>     10. We have mailing list moderation, threads are getting closed and
>         users get unsubscribed.

If those actions are not warranted by the actions of those users then we
have a problem.

>     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.

Replacing someone brilliant is not easy.

>     12. We have groups in Fedora (made of of Red Hat employees) that do
>         not listen to the community and do not even listen to the
>         (former) FPL. 

That is a problem if true.

>     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. 

Can only account that to human error.

>     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.

Yes I heard this, and yes it's somewhat troublesome.

> > There is some noticeable friction relating to the Fedora trademark which
> > seriously holds back certain aspects of the community, but I doubt the
> > last words have been said on that.
> 
> So, what do you expect here? My experience has thought me that if there
> is a change, it will not be for the better.

Lawyers seldom changes things to the better, but is also not the only
ones who have a say. And in this case I do suspect things will need to
go worse before other solutions are looked for. But I am still
optimistic that situation regarding use of trademark will be noticeably
better than today in a couple of years time.

Regards
Henrik