A Face-to-Face Conversation with Max Spevack of Fedora

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]

“Q: What is the vision for Fedora today?

“Max: One of the things that we’ve been doing
very actively for the last year and a half, certainly since I’ve
been the Fedora leader and even earlier during Greg DeKoenigsberg’s
leadership, has been to transition the governance and decision
making process in Fedora to be more community focused. We have
tried to build a technical leadership in Fedora that can be owned
and run by the community. If those community members happen to be
from Red Hat, that’s great and if they are non Red Hat
contributors, that’s fine too. So the Fedora Extras project started
as a way to do this. The leadership group of that effort, for the
vast majority, were non Red Hat folks. It took about two years or
so but Fedora Extras was very successful. We saw that the packages
being built by community volunteers in a lot of ways were better
than the packages that were built purely within Red Hat. The
guidelines for building those packages were better, the end results
were better. And so the guidelines and decisions that the Fedora
Extras community made were slowly adopted into Fedora Core. Now
we’ve thrown away the idea of Core completely and merged everything
into one repository that basically follows all the rules that
Fedora Extras had set out. So now the build system that all the
packages of Fedora get built on is all completely external, all
completely open source. Everything relies on the community and
there are a lot of interesting things that means…”

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