Fedora's Max Spevack took the time to grant Glyn Moody an interview which he has published on his blog. The interview itself was informative and insightful as Glyn successfully guided readers through some important topics related to Fedora, Red Hat, its open source software development process and more. After reading the interview I thought it might be useful to add commentary on some important points.
- Fedora exists upstream from Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Max made a telling statement in the interview when he said he believes "...that the Fedora Project represents sort of the soul of Red Hat." So obviously, in this case, even if Fedora is upstream from an engineering perspective this doesn't imply very much logical separation from Red Hat either.
- Red Hat serves as an active integrator of Fedora, a fully open source community: Fedora is Red Hat's integration point with its open source community and it has shown the desire to create an open sandbox where Red Hat and non-Red Hat affiliated folks can get involved.
- Fedora fits into the product engineering cycle for Red Hat: I'm still wondering how long it's going to take non-open source companies to realize how valuable a proposition it is to be able to leverage the open source development model at some point in a product engineering cycle. The end product doesn't even have to be open source to make this approach worthwhile.
- Balance between Red Hat's business priorities and Fedora's community priorities: Standard in pretty much every (successful) community associated with a commercial open source outfit.
- Road maps still matter within open source: Taking the time to maintain a road map can ever be negative, especially within larger scale projects.
- Community ownership is key to Fedora's success: I refer to it as shared ownership but whatever the chosen terminology, it is becoming imperative as another one of those open source qualifiers.
- Fedora is 100% open source with a transparent build process: Open access to source code is just one qualifier for an open source community. Open processes are another.
- Red Hat as sponsor: The company plays the role of for-profit corporation as benefactor similar to the one IBM used to play with Eclipse.
While Red Hat takes its fair share of flack for not providing a truly open source Linux operating system in the form of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it should be noted that it has been able to successfully back a stalwart distro/community in the form of Fedora. The company is then able to connect to the dynamics of Fedora's community and pass its value throughout the product development life cycle for its flagship product. No, RHEL isn't pure open source, but it is a direct beneficiary of the output of open source productive forces, which are effectively enabled by Red Hat itself...something which, has thus far, worked to the company's benefit.
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