I've had a few conversations recently where someone expressed interest in GNU/Linux and asked about getting involved. I really wanted to suggest that they consider joining the Fedora project but I couldn’t do that comfortably because, well, there are some pretty massive issues.
So I'm really excited to see that Redhat is finally getting around to really supporting the excellent volunteer community that has dedicated themselves to making Fedora, and by extension Redhat’s commercial offerings, excellent distributions. Herewith some recent news that led to this post…
Seth Vidal gave a promising update on the status of Fedora Extras. For those not familiar with the breakdown of the Fedora community, Extras is to be a repository of additional packages for Fedora that aren’t part of the core distro but are packaged and tested using the same tools and processes. It was actually a separate project at one point (fedora.us). To my knowledge, Extras consists almost entirely of volunteer work and has been seriously neglected by Redhat leading to all kinds of disgruntlement among the community.
I'm not sure if Seth is going to be taking on some kind of formal leadership role for the volunteer side but, having worked with him on Yum, I can say that something like that would be hugely valuable to the community. His leadership skills are exceptional and I've always thought he’s done a tremendous job of keeping the crack out of yum.
The other bit is from Colin Charles who declares that this is Fedora’s most productive week (and it’s only mid-week). Again, the emphasis here is that the community is finally being paid for all their hard work and dedication—with tools to do more hard work no less.
It has always baffled me why Redhat hasn’t thrown these guys a bigger bone. It would be like going to Nike and saying, “Hey, if you build a factory, we'll work for free as long as we can have a couple pairs of shoes.” Nike would have that factory up the next day. It took Redhat almost two years. Crazy.
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