“Last week, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, Michael
Tiemann–formerly Red Hat’s CTO and now vice president of open
source affairs–spoke about the role of Fedora, Red Hat’s free
Linux distribution. To refute the claim that Fedora represents a
fork of its core product, Tiemann appealed to a notion that is best
summed up in a phrase popularized by Tim O’Reilly: ‘the
architecture of participation.’ To meet the needs of the enterprise
customers who pay Red Hat’s bills, Tiemann said, it was necessary
to slow the release cycle and create ‘a massively long release
runway on which Oracle, and Veritas, and BEA, and all these other
guys could actually land.’ But the solution to one business problem
created another. It disenfranchised the people in the open source
community whose energy and ideas created Linux and continue to
drive its evolution. Fedora’s goal, Tiemann said, is to be a bridge
to that community and to convey both quality and innovation into
the enterprise product…”