Who's moderating this forum?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 07/17/2010 04:27 AM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
>
>
> Which premise is false? That the board doesn't need to have to
> comprise a majority of RH employees? Does this change anything to the
> fact that "Red Hat can steer Fedora any way it wants", mainly that the
> Fedora Project Leader is appointed by Red Hat and has veto power?

FPL has in the entirely history of the project never exercised that veto
power and it is carefully defined to in the wiki as such.  The majority
of the board is elected which was a factual inaccuracy in what you said
and works on the basis of consensus.  As a former board myself,  Red Hat
has never told me to do anything specifically in the Fedora Board and
the culture of Red Hat which is typically engineer driven,  allows
independent contributors to be valued as such instead of just employees
in a company.  When Board discussed issues, typical disagreements have
been voiced between employees themselves.  In other words, people are
not drones.

Governance in Fedora is rather light weight and board in particular does
not interfere in day to day routine work which is led by contributors. 
The large majority of package maintainers, about 80% IIRC are volunteers
and FESCo which is the engineering body is fully elected as well.  If
Red Hat exercised veto power and made a decision, the large majority of
contributors do not agree with, they can fork and all of Fedora
including infrastructure code is free and open as per policy to allow
that freedom.  So in effect,   the situation isn't quite the black and
white picture you try to portray.    Red Hat does have a strong say in
certain aspects of Fedora including legal matters because Red Hat
carries that burden as the legal entity behind Fedora and it's primary
sponsor.

Rahul