Red Hat and the new Fedora

Red Hat is trying to re-energize the Fedora community in hopes of spurring some growth in the use of the distribution.

Red Hat is the flag-bearer for the Open Source community. I believe Matt Szulik has done a fantastic job of making Red Hat a profitable company as well as capturing the vision about what open source is all about. I attended his Linux World Expo keynote in San Franciso this past year and the only way to describe it was stirring. I could even see it in the eyes of the attendees as they left; they were fired up and knew they were in the right place. At the end of the day, Red Hat has to survive and it’s going to do what it has to to make that happen.

I look across the changes in licensing/pricing at Red Hat over the last two years and I see that it was critical to their continued sustainability. It is working for them right now because there is a critical mass in the FOSS world and they are able to stand on the shoulders of many giants in the community to make it happen.

IMHO - Red Hat is a product company. The product is a packaged software developed mostly by people outside of the Red Hat corporate umbrella. Their value is in packaging software and guaranteeing access to updates to their subscribers and customers. To me, this is a step back … a step in the direction of what Sun and Microsoft are. Ironically, Red Hat will meet somewhere in the middle with Sun and Microsoft as recent announcements show they are headed in the other direction. Red Hat is a Sun or Microsoft just with slightly lower costs. I don’t see a lot of innovation there. But as I said before, Red Hat has to survive and they have to do what it takes to get there.

Unfortunately, they are still having a hard time getting buy in from the community on Fedora. Why is that?

While I was at LWE 2004 in San Francisco I got to go to the Gentoo Linux community meeting. There were 50+ people there. This is for a distribution that is less than 3 years old. The energy and enthusiasm was palpable in the room. Just down the hall was the Fedora community meeting. In attendence? 7 people.

So what’s the difference?! We know there are more Fedora users in the world than Gentoo users. Maybe there are just more per-capita in the SFO-area. Maybe Gentoo was more organized, etc. Maybe it was because the OSL was handing out bitchin’ t-shirts. I think the problem is more deeply rooted in the difference between Gentoo and Fedora; community participation and ownership.

Red Hat has announced that they were going to be making changes to help people get more ownership and access to the development of Fedora. This would include access to the latest CVS updates and possibly more in the future. Is this enough? I don’t think so.

What would I do if I were Red Hat?

The FOSS community is hesitent to embrace a distribution that is driven by a company with profits in mind. I’m not trying to get hoity toity on everybody; you’ve got to make a living somehow. However, if you are going to depend on the volunteer work of others, you have to find a way to ease the mind of possible developers in the community if you’re going to get people on board with your distribution. Limiting participation in development and decision making will hurt the prospects for your distro in the future.

I look across the Linux distribution landscape and I see several distributions that have been born specifically because people wanted an alternative to Red Hat. Look at Gentoo Linux and more importantly cAos Linux. These distros are gaining momentum because users are able to participate immediately, make an impact and have ownership in its direction. This comes back to ownership of your own destiny; if Red Hat controls the direction of Fedora, how can a user have piece of mind in investing their time and effort in it?

I would create a Fedora Foundation that would be the non-profit organization that would control the direction of the distro. On its board of directors would be members of the FOSS community and representatives from Red Hat. The stated mission of this Foundation would be to build a community that would be the early adopters of Red Hat’s new technologies that will eventually find their way into RHEL.

This may be difficult for a public company to stomach. The big concern from a developers standpoint is that Red Hat may decide to change direction of the Fedora product tomorrow and then leave people out in the cold that have invested their time and energy into the product. This is all about control of destiny. If Fedora is in the hands of the community, then the community and developers will follow. I would be willing to bet so would the energy and excitement too.