Right now we are looking for someone who can take over significant focus on Fedora, as well as provide skills in community consulting and strategy for other Red Hat efforts.

Myself, I’m looking for another rounded, senior-level person who can apply the open source way – thinking & doing – as well as help make practitioners out of other people. Just spread this word around – someone out there hasn’t thought her or his self in this role yet, but could be.

Looking at this role, it is an example of job skills and merit that can be learned and earned while working on open source projects. You may not be currently in the field of “community relations and management”, but you may already have all the skills needed to teach and do the open source way inside and outside of software projects.

And you certainly don’t need to have come up through the Fedora Project, but that can’t hurt. Historically, we do what anyone would do – hire the people we know are great at doing the job we want done. Your work in Fedora should reflect that. If you have other open source project experience, it’s out there. If you’ve been practicing the open source way correctly, you’ll be able to show us that experience using open content in public archives.

Check out the job posting. I’m not in control of the process, but I think the location could be flexible for the right person, so it’s worth considering even if you don’t want to move to Raleigh and be our voice-in-the-seat-at-Red-Hat-HQ.

If you are someone who I would recommend anyway – so I would be biased toward you in a selection process – I’d be more than happy to pass you into our resume system with a recommendation.

(Updated to fix my incorrect interpretation of the job requirements; having worked in the Fedora Project already is a written job requirement.)

Do you have any interest in seeing Alfresco packaged for Fedora?  Having it in an EPEL repository for use in Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 (& v.4?) would be great …

Do you have any skill and experience at estimating how much work is involved in the packaging effort for Alfresco?

Recall that Fedora Release Engineering specifically recommends, 1.) get your package in JPackage.org, 2.) put it in Fedora, 3.) maintain it in both.  That’s the recommended way to prepare for the future, whatever it holds.

Why am I asking?  I’ll tell you …

Someone with a desire to see Alfresco packaged for their enterprise environment + willingness to invest resources has asked me about this effort.

The first thing I need to deliver is an estimate that lets them know if they should continue pursuing this route or pull back and do an ugly wrapper-package that doesn’t use system libraries and other horrenduous ugliness we don’t want them to suffer under.  You all know how it is …

This is a chance for a few dedicated folks to get together and produce a fine set of packages for a much-desired enterprise CMS.  If you are interested, leave a comment to this post, or contact me via the usual places.

What resonated most with me was the idea that my content may be licensed to remain open and accessible, but if the file system is not free and open, the writing and storage of that content is paramount to encoding it in a proprietary format.

This was the most compelling part of the discussion, the part that made me want to rip out proprietary hardware and file systems to replace it with anything more open.  The fact that my soup pot doesn’t usually include OpenSolaris, ZFS, etc. doesn’t matter to me.

Yes, I’m sure you can cook something similar right now with btfrfs and Fedora 11.  There is another angle to view, which is stability over time.  You want to be careful about putting your first-line storage on a development-quality file system.  With that idea … does it make sense to create a first-tier storage using Nexenta.org?  It is built from OpenSolaris, a robust, stable, enterprise-quality kernel plus ZFS, which has been deployed in the enterprise for a number of years? ZFS is also a few years older as a technology than btrfs.

Then use Fedora plus btrfs as second-tier.  The trick is, both work on commodity x86 hardware, so you can create a large first- and second-tier storage solution for a fraction of the cost of a propietary hardware and software blend.  That’s a bonus after freeing your content from a proprietary file system.

I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if you could just do ‘yum install hadoop’ and it would all be taken care of?  So I wrote up a suggestion for Cloudera, “Install in Fedora and Enterprise Linuxes in one step“.

If you are a Hadoop user, a Cloudera customer, or otherwise interested in this technology, feel free to visit the suggestion page and let them know you think is as great an idea as I think it is.

(Side note: There is a serious lack of software vendors (ISVs) getting applications directly in to Fedora.  They end up duplicating platform components, increasing their QA and support costs.  Many of them are targeting RHEL and derivatives (CentOS, Scientific Linux, etc.) for their customer base, yet they are missing the opportunity to get RHEL 6 alpha and beta testing done six to twelve months in advance.  Because I care, I took on improving this situation as part of my community development job, and am running efforts through the ISV SIG.)