fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Mike McGrath]

On Sat, 28 Aug 2010, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:

>   On 08/28/2010 08:28 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > What are you afraid of?
>
> I think my concerns have been very clear.
>
> >   Fedora is not a country, you don't have to move to get away. All the code is free. Most the code isn't even ours, it belongs to the upstreams. If somebody were to buy RHT, the worse they could do is prevent previous RHT employees from working on it as their day job, turn off the servers and sit on the trademarks. All the code and people can go to a new project name.  It would just take a few servers and an uplink to the mirror system, which is not owned by RHT or Fedora.  There really isn't any intellectual property around Fedora that isn't open and transparent.  Man power may die off, but some arbitrary rule about how many people who might be employed by RHT can serve in decision bodies wouldn't change that at all.
> >
> > So I ask you again, what are you so afraid of that you think you can fix?
>
> I'm afraid of what might happen if an individual like you, an key player
> within the community suddenly disappears from the face of the planet.
>
> So let me ask you this who's your backup ( given that you at least have
> one within Red Hat ) and can a community member step in you're shoes to
> full fill your role in your absence?
>

Dennis is his backup (RH employee) and if need be I know jwb (not redhat
employee) is more than capable of handling these problems.  Believe it or
not, we do consider these things and cross train.  If you have the
several hours per week available to contribute for a few years you too
could be a backup.

I know it's not a comfortable thing to deal with, I know I'm not super
happy about it but Fedora exists almost entirely because RH wills it to.
If RH decided Fedora should go away, it would.  You could fork, have a
mess of a time getting infrastructure, and get that fork going but that
wouldn't be Fedora, it'd be something else.

We tried to turn Fedora into an independent legal entity with multiple
stakeholders and there was almost 0 support in terms of funding for it
(Google: Fedora Foundation).  Bottom line, when Red Hat tried to give
Fedora to the community, the community wasn't there to take it.  All you
can do is trust RH to do the right thing, know we'll make mistakes from
time to time and know that those of us that were volunteers that have now
been lucky enough to be hired on to do it full time (myself included) are
looking out for Fedora's best interest, not a paycheck.

	-Mike