Hi, my name is Eduard Lucena. I'm from the marketing team from the Fedora Project. I'm here with Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project leader. We're talking about what is Fedora, how it's a community, and talk about how the community works.
Matthew Miller:Hi. Glad to be here with you. This is the first of these podcasts here, right?
Eduard:Yeah, yeah. It's been a long time, though, planning. Hopefully we can do several episodes.
Matthew:I'm excited to start out the series.
Eduard:We'd like to start big, Fedora Project leader sound's really good for the first episode. Tell me about the history of Fedora. How did Fedora start? How is this going?
Matthew:Fedora started about 15 years ago, really. It actually started as a thing called Fedora.us. Back in those days, there was Red Hat Linux. Red Hat was a company. They had a thing called Red Hat Linux, which you could either get for free or you could buy in a store in a box and get some support. They weren't making very much money. Their business plan was like, "Maybe we'll sell T-shirts and hats" which does not make for a very successful software company. It was a pretty popular Linux distribution and one of the best ones out there, and so, it had a big following. Meanwhile, there was this thing called Fedora.us, which was basically a project to make additional software available to users of Red Hat Linux. Find things that weren't part of Red Hat Linux, and package them up, and make them available to everybody. That was started as a community project. Meanwhile, Red Hat decided that they needed a new strategy in order to actually make money as a company. They decided that they were going to focus on the enterprise market with a subscription to a fairly high cost value add thing that has become Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which Red Hat's a multi-billion-dollar company today. It's clearly a strategy that worked. But as part of that, that enterprise thing is focused on very big companies and big institutions with a lot of money and very different needs from small business, medium business, individual contributors, schools, and those kind of things. Also, some of the values, the things that make that valuable, are moving very slowly, are very deliberate and careful changes. 10 years of support, 15 years of support, that kind of thing which is not necessarily what you want if you're running on your laptop, running on your own server, or, these days, a cloud instance. Red Hat, at the same time, they merged with this Fedora.us project to form Fedora, the Fedora Project that produces an upstream operating system that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is derived from but then moves on a slower pace. We had Fedora. We were then two parts, Fedora Core, which was basically inherited from the old Red Hat Linux and only Red Hat employees could do anything with and then Fedora Extras, where community could come together to add things on top of that Fedora Core. It took a little while to get off the ground but it was fairly successful, but there was also a lot of problems between where community fit in, who got to do what, and who was special just because they worked for what company. Around the time of Fedora Core 6, those were actually merged together into one big Fedora where all of the packages were all part of the same thing. There was no more distinction of Core and Extras, and everything was all together and, more importantly, all the community was all together. There wasn't a thing where it said, "If you work for Red Hat then you can have these packages. If you don't work for Red Hat, you can only do the edges." They invited the community to take ownership of the whole thing and for Red Hat to become part of the community rather than separate. That was a huge success. It took a little while to take off but that's where we have Fedora as it stands today, where we have a lot of core contributors who don't work for Red Hat and who really can make a difference in the project, which is awesome. Where we have something, that it'd been a really good base for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, RHEL 7, and now upcoming, whatever number comes out after 7 is on its way.
Eduard:That's was certainly a huge step to the community. I am a contributor for almost three years now. I want to talk more about what is the mission of Fedora as a community and as a project itself.
Matthew:We adopted a new mission just the last year or so, focused, were we're going. Our previous mission was vague and hard to act on. I don't know if this one's perfect but it's a step better. Our mission is Fedora creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users. Like all mission statements, that's a mouthful. Basically, the idea is we build stuff that the community and other people can take and then take the users and say, "OK, here look, we solved your problem," or, "We made something cool for you." We have our big flagship things, our Fedora workstation -- which is a desktop operating system -- kind of aimed at programmers but good for everybody. Then we have a Fedora server for use case and Fedora Atomic which fits the cloud and container case. We've got some of the big offerings but then we have a lot of other things that I think are neat. I think the Fedora Python Lab is a great example. Somebody took a bunch of the Python stuff and Fedora and put it together into a virtual machine and Docker container and things that can be used. People teaching Python in schools have something right out of the box they can that has all this nice, rich Python stuff available to them. That's a really good example of something that our mission enables.
Eduard:That sounds really awesome. As far as our community, I think one of the core values is that we can take anybody in here. It doesn't matter if he's a technician, a computer guy, or if he's a designer, or even a doctor or anything. I think this is because we have something called the Four F's. I'd really like for you to hear about that.
Matthew:Yeah, the Four F's are the four foundations of Fedora. They go hand in hand with that mission statement, represent the values of our community and underlie the mission statement. It's like how we do things and why do we things rather than what we're doing which is what the mission statement is. The first of those is Freedom. Actually, let me list them all. They're Freedom, Friends, Features, and First. Freedom is our dedication to free software and to content. It's not just free as in doesn't cost money, although that's actually very important because we want this to be available to everybody ,but we also want everybody to be able to share Fedora, come and contribute to it and have their ideas have impact on things. When you get that Fedora Python Lab, you're free to do what you want with it, to share it and improve it. Software freedom is an important value of Fedora. Then the second one is Friends. I think you talked about that as well because everyone is welcome in Fedora. We really are a group of people that work together to make this thing that is this piece of software, but to me, when you say, what is Fedora, the thing that comes to my mind first is the people, the project, the people we meet at the conferences, or online, you hang out on IRC, all these different things, chat. There's a big Telegram community, there's all these different things. That community of people is really what makes it work, because there's a lot of software projects out there but it's the people that makes it special. I think Fedora is really cool, the Friends foundation is important. Then Features, Features, basically means we want to have our software be useful to people. It can't just be that we do easy things, or we're an experimenting thing. We actually want to have software that people can use to get stuff done. It's got to have the features that users need. First, it balances that. Fedora's mission is to move fast and be on the leading edge of operating system development. If you don't want to be on the leading edge then something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS is probably a better place for you. Balanced with the features, we want to make sure that we don't just have the first stuff that doesn't work. We want to have the first software that has been tested by the community and actually is functional for people, so that's the core foundations.
Eduard:Yeah, sometimes people called "bleeding edge" because sometimes we have some stuff when it's really, really new.
Matthew:Right. I want to stress, I really want Fedora to stay away from the bleeding edge. The bleeding edge is fine. There are parts of Fedora if you want to be an experiment tester, you can be in that bleeding edge. It's available to you, but for most Fedora users, you should not bleed. You should be happy using it. It should be functional and useful without causing pain and your insides leaking out just because you're trying to use software.
Eduard:We can say that it's leading for public and bleeding for testers.
Matthew:That's true. If you want to sign up to be a part of the experiment then that's awesome and helpful.
Eduard:I met a lot of people that use Rawhide, and they have no problems with it.
Matthew:Rawhide is our development tree, basically. I think there's a hat joke in there somewhere, like it's made out of the raw leather. You know, Fedora's a hat, although you don't make Fedoras out of leather. I don't know where it comes from. It was called Rawhide back in the Red Hat Linux days, in the old times. Rawhide is the testing, development tree of it. If you want to follow the very latest of everything Red Hat's developers put into the tree we're working on, you can run Rawhide. Several thousand people do do that. It is very, very helpful. Those people bleed so the rest of us don't have to, I guess.
Eduard:[laughs] Yeah. When we talk about a community that is really big -- like I think is Fedora community, or when you have a project that is big enough, like any software that is out to the world, like Linux, itself -- they need to have a structure to make it work. It's not just a lot of people doing pull requests. How these fit together.
Matthew:It took a while for all of us to figure out how to make this work in Fedora, in a good way, as the project grew. Originally, the organizational body in Fedora was the Fedora Packaging Committee that basically made, "Here's the guidelines for how to put together an RPM" which was fine when making add-on RPMs, Software packages for Red Hat Linux was the main goal, but as the community grew and as the focus came to be more, "This is Fedora as a group of people, not just a collection of software," we needed to have some more and different governance. First, we had the Fedora board. I won't go into the whole history lesson of it right now. We've got it set up now. The top body is the Fedora Council, which is about six people and then some auxiliary roles. That's the top leadership of the project. A couple of those are elected. Some of them, like mine, are appointed. I'm paid by Red Hat to work on this full time, which is a wonderful privilege. Others are selected from the community, by the community, to work on a certain thing. We have an engineering lead and a Mindshare lead. I'll talk about those in a little bit. We have a couple elected positions, as well, to bring a little bit of democracy into it, to balance the appointed roles and that kind of thing. This group operates by consensus, which is a process I'm really excited about. I think it's an important way to make sure they're included in decision making. We don't generally vote on things in the sense of majority rules. If we have a decision to make, we talk about it, and we try to come to agreement. Consensus doesn't necessarily mean that everybody completely agrees, but it means that everybody in the body, everybody who works on it, feels good about the decision and can say, "OK, even, even if this isn't something that I think is...I'm not sure I agree with this, but I respect the rest of you. And I feel like, OK, I'm not going to block it." If somebody feels really strongly about something, they can say, "OK, this is important. I'm going to block this," and then we talk about it until we come to some sort of thing that convinces that person. It hasn't come to a situation where we've needed to do that very much, so it works pretty well. An important thing is that power of consensus and blocking doesn't just belong to Red Hat or to anybody. The elected people, the appointed people all have a share in this consensus-making. I think that's a really exciting, cool thing about the governance in Fedora, in particular. We have several other, different governance bodies. Because Fedora is so big, there's something like 4,000 people who participate in Fedora some way every year, which is huge and awesome, but would be too much for one governing body. [laughs] We also have a Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, which works on the technical side. We have this new Mindshare Committee, which is just getting kicked off. They're having an activity day coming up in a few months. The idea of that is basically all of the things, like marketing, documentation, the ambassadors, and all of the parts of the project that aren't putting together the bits, but are on talking to people and growing the user base and the contributor base in the Mindshare domain.
Eduard:Thankfully, I was elected for marketing to be in the Mindshare committee.
Matthew:Congratulations.
Eduard:Thank you. [laughs] I'm really excited, too. When we work in the community, I start to see that some things, they were doing it this way all the time. It works, so we don't want to do it other way. But, other way can be good sometimes. Mindshare is going to put all these things together and say, "Hey, we need to figure it out, if new will be better or if old way is better," and try to refigure it out how to work, as a committee.
Matthew:Yeah, I'm really excited about that. Because it is a technical project, we've had a lot of people come to all this from an engineering background. If you look at the Engineering Steering Committee and QA, or at least Engineering, all of that was pretty well structured. It all made sense. Then we had other groups, like the marketing group, the documentation, design, and ambassadors, who all were in a little bubble and not talking to each other very well and doing duplicate things. The ambassadors don't necessarily know what the marketing strategy is. Others don't get feedback from the ambassadors. I'm excited Mindshare is going to fix all of our problems.
Eduard:You just mentioned that you are in a paid position by Red Hat as Fedora Project leader. What is the Fedora Project leader, and why it is paid by Red Hat?
Matthew:I've done this for almost four years now, which makes me the longest serving Fedora Project leader, ever. It seems to drive people crazy. Maybe I'm crazy to start with, so I'm immune or something. I don't know. The Fedora Project Leader is the named leader of the project. Other than my role on the council, I don't really have the ability to order people around because it is a volunteer project. Nobody at Red Hat reports to me, so I have to use influence to get things done. That's true with volunteers, as well. I try to show some things that people can plug into, and mostly try and find out what the community wants to do, enable people to get the most done, try and make sure that everybody is coordinated. Sometimes you hear community positions like this referred to as herding cats. Herding cats isn't right for Fedora. It's not like it's my decision to take a bunch of cats and send them in a certain direction. It's a role where my job is to listen to the cats, figure out what the cats are trying to accomplish, what's getting in their way from doing it, and help enable the cats to all go in one direction, together, not to herd them. That's the role as project lead. I also serve as a representation of the project to Red Hat, try and help make sure that Red Hat, as a company, understands what the project is doing and what we want and need.
Eduard:Just a quick question. Did you work for Red Hat before being the FPL?
Matthew:I did. I came into Red Hat. I was hired to work on Fedora Cloud. I did that for a year or so before taking the FPL role when the previous FPL, Robyn Bergeron, was ready to move on. She went to Ansible, and then did awesome stuff over there, as well. She really experienced a lot of burnout. It's a pretty high-stress role. One of the things Robyn did when she was leaving was try and set up the role and the governance to be better for the next person who came along. One of the things she did is help get this role called the FCAIC, the Fedora community action and impact coordinator set up. That's Brian Exelbierd. His job is community maintenance, making sure that people all around the world are included in the project, that we have a healthy, functioning community, and that that community grows. It's a role that might be called community manager in a lot of other projects, but we don't like that name because manager implies that you manage two things. You manage employees or you manage problems. Fedora contributors are neither employees nor problems, so manager didn't sound like the right title. We came up with the current one. It's not the best name, but Brian's stuck with it. He goes by FCAIC like the dessert.
Eduard:He's like a piece of cake, just so.
Matthew:Yes.
Eduard:He's a great person. Hopefully, we can have in one episode.
Matthew:I'm sure he'll be glad to do that.
Eduard:Right now, we're talking about how Fedora works as community, how is everything integrated. For me, I entered the community because a beautiful person called Tatia. She's a great, great contributor, a great ambassador in my country. It's not easy to get inside the community, not because there is not accessible. There is a lot of tools. We have now WhatCanIDoForFedora that is really helpful, but to get things together, see people talking in other languages, there is a lot of tools in there, the Zanata project for translation or the docs that use AsciiDoc. For people that is not inside the computing world, for example a doctor or maybe a lawyer or anything, how they can inside this world of this community
Matthew:If you're not a highly technical person, how can you get involved in Fedora? It is a little bit hard. We have some barriers there. One thing, the askfedoraproject.org, that's something we're looking at. Right now, we host that in our infrastructure. We're working on a deal with the developer who lives in Chile to have him host the site and maybe do a little work and development on it. This is a question and answers website that, if you have problems, you can ask and get answers back. I think that's a really easy way to plug in. If you know a little bit, you can help a little bit, and then it can build up everybody's answers together, helps. That's available in several different languages, as well. I think that's a pretty cool way people can plug in. Documentation writing is nice, although that's a technical skill, as well. I don't know. Part of this is figuring out, with the Mindshare thing, how we can address these users and use cases better. What is the most useful thing for them? How people with a less technical background can plug in. If you have skills like design, in drawing, or those kind of things -- user experience -- the design team is a good place. We also have a whole group that's the Join Fedora group. If you're interested, but don't know where you fit, talking to those people might be the useful thing to do. They can say, "Oh, hey, I now. What are you interested in? What are your skills? Here's something you can contribute to, and you can make a difference."
Eduard:For me, I can say that ambassadors is a great role. They are called to be the face of Fedora in the project.
Matthew:Yeah.
Eduard:I think for people it's good to know where is an ambassador in your country or in your place and try to get in contact with him. We're trying to improve that communication with the people. I think that Mindshare with help with this, too, because a hard part of being an ambassador is that you need to be social outside of work. You need to be connected with the technical product, what is new or what is happening, what is the software about to ship. The ambassadors need a new leading way. Remember that we are moving to a new paradigm of ambassadors.
Matthew:We used to have the Fedora user and developer conferences, the FUDCons. We got rid of those in favor of Flock, which is a Fedora conference that's very focused on internal, on the contributors and the people who build Fedora and build the things around Fedora, which has been great. We don't quite know how we're going to do user outreach. That all has to be reinvented. I think there's probably places at user-focused conferences that ambassadors could go. I'd really like to see people take things they've done with Fedora and show them off at places other than Fedora-specific conferences. If you made something with Fedora, take that and show the people what you've made. I think that's a really good way to help spread Fedora.
Eduard:I will invite you to the next FLISoL here in Chile to see how.
Matthew:I would love to come sometime. I've been trying to travel less than previous FPLs have. I'm in my 40s, and traveling around the world is kind of wearing me out. I love to see other parts of the world and to see people everywhere, so I hope I do get to come there some time. One of these years, I will.
Eduard:In Latin America and in Spain, that is Latin, but it's not Latin America. We have a huge event that we call FLISoL. It's Free and Liberal InstallFest when we held a lot of community together, and it's quite big here in Latin America. The problem is that it's the only event that is being held yearly. Other events are just one event here, one event there. It's not a continued...
Matthew:There's not very many repeating events? FLISoL is the center of energy?
Eduard:Yeah.
Matthew:There's nothing like the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels every year in Europe. There might be room for something like that.
Eduard:Some time we had, it's called something like Latin PYCON or Latam PYCON or something, but it was only two years, and then disappeared. I don't know why.
Matthew:Red Hat has a conference called DevConf that I just got back from in Brno, in the Czech Republic. That has been pretty successful there. I know that they are starting to do one in India and in the United States. It may be something that, if those other replica conferences are successful, maybe Red Hat would be interested in doing an annual thing in Latin America. It sounds like there's room for something like that. I'll talk to the events people about that.
Eduard:We have community here, so come to us. [laughs]
Matthew:Yeah, absolutely. I know the Latin Fedora community is very vibrant and I think has a lot to offer to the rest of Fedora and the rest of the world. I think that's exciting.
Eduard:As a last question, I want to ask you what is the future in Fedora in the technical way and in the community way, in that two fronts?
Matthew:There's a lot of things going on. The thing I'm excited about right at this moment, Red Hat just bought a company called CoreOS, which has a thing called Container Linux. They have a bunch of stuff around Kubernetes and the container orchestration ecosystem that is exciting to other parts of the company. The Container Linux part is exciting to me, because it's related to Fedora Atomic. It'll be interesting to see where that goes. At the DevConf conference there was a lot of talk about using OSTree -- that's the base for Fedora Atomic -- to make a better workstation that is more easy for people who are less technical to use. That can be kept up-to-date with safe updates, so that you don't ever have a risk of putting your computer to a state where you can't use it. That's pretty neat. I think we'll see a lot of things around that in the technology space. In the community, the Mindshare thing is happening. We're also having a documentation workshop later this month, that's going to be, I think, in Spain, in Seville. We're going to get a bunch of people in a room, in a lovely city, and we'll say: "You can't see the city at all. You're in this hotel room working on documentation. Sorry."
Eduard:Please Brian, you don't hear any country or any city.
Matthew:[laughs] The idea is we have a new Fedora documentation site, but it's kind of sparse. We want to kick off this new site, have good basic documentation there, and get a bunch of people who have the skills to use it, so that we can grow the documentation. That's an important aspect of Fedora that's been languishing recently. That's one of the big community things I'm excited about.
Eduard:If I remember, in the past the documentation was only the installation guide that is probably the same from version to version.
Matthew:There's an installation guide, a systems administration guide, and several other guides. They're actually very good, but they're structured as books. They're made to produce, "Here's a book that you can read." Nobody wants documentation like that anymore because it's not 1995. Even though these was really well written and useful books, nobody is looking at them. People would like more how-to, quick documentation, "I want to do this. How do I do it?" sorts of things or quick references. We're moving to a model that has that look rather than the "here's a book" look to it.
Eduard:That's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much, Matthew, to come here. I know you are a busy man.
Matthew:Thank you for having me. I'm glad to do it. OK, cool. Thank you for doing this.
Eduard:No, thanks to you.
Matthew:Bye.
Eduard:Bye.
Matthew:Talk to you soon.