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ISV special interest group in Fedora

12-Aug-08

If you don’t know what an ISV is, then you aren’t part of one. Independent software vendors are everyone from Red Hat to small two-person coding boutiques. They are a group in the business world that has specific needs and problems, which may or may not match with the other needs we have in general open source communities.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/ISV_Welcome

ISVs have always been a part of open source and Fedora, but there are a number of changes over the past eighteen months that have drawn a lot of attention to Fedora from ISVs.

One of these is the creation of the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository. ISVs can have their open source packages ready to install to RHEL 4 and 5 environments without having to spin up the development, packaging, and delivery infrastructure. They also gain immeasurably by being part of the Fedora community and getting a six to twenty-four month head start on their testing for the next version of RHEL.

Another important milestone is the arrival of OpenJDK 6 in Fedora and EPEL, which is now certified as 100% Java.  Because of the need to compile everything from source in Fedora, we were previously limited by what applications could get working under gcj.  Having a certified Java in Fedora and EPEL is an open invitation to Java web application developers and ISVs that specialize in that software.

If you are part of an ISV or otherwise interested in seeing them succeed in Fedora, join the ISV SIG, especially the mailing list.  The purpose of the list is to discuss the issues special to ISVs, with technical discussions happening in the usual places.

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Fedora is about to break what is most important to you …

11-Aug-08

… and the only way you can prevent it is to test Fedora 10 Alpha.

Fortunately this is stupid easy. Grab an Alpha ISO live image, load it on to a USB device, or just run it straight up in a virtual environment either using virt-manager or from the command line:

su -c 'qemu -cdrom Fedora-10-Alpha-i686-Live-KDE -m 512 -std-vga'

Then test the five things most important to you in the upcoming version of Fedora.

Whatever you use Fedora for, there are at least five tasks, pieces of software, or bundles of tools that are important to you.

Who knows? You might find and help get fixed a bug that could have made it all the way to the final version, where it would annoy you to no end.

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A matter of community evolution — reflections on interviews from LinuxWorld

11-Aug-08

Thanks Linux Pro Magazine for getting together some community folks from various Linux distros and letting us appear, in a side-by-side comparison, as nearly identical. ;-D This is not a criticism! It just shows there is a certain amount of convergence in the popular Linux distros, no matter how many comparison shootouts people are holding.

Joe Casad, Linux Pro editor-in-chief, said at the start of the interview, “I have with me … Karsten Wade, who’s the community manager for the Fedora Project.” This is similar to the language on the landing page for the videos, “Linux Pro Editor in Chief Joe Casad sat down with the community managers of the Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Fedora projects …” (I put the emphasis on “the” in both quotes.)

I haven’t looked closely at the number and structure of the community team in Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, but I do know that I’ve seen Zonker (OpenSUSE) and Jono (Ubuntu) listed, introduced, and otherwise titled as the sole community manager for their distribution. They oversee a number of jobs rolled in to one person, much as Max Spevack was when he started as the Fedora Project Leader. These days, those roles are distributed across a number of people.

Maybe it’s just a reflection of the relative maturity of Fedora, but it seems there are a half-dozen people who work on community architecture, what we’ve dubbed our step-up from community management. The only reason I told Joe Casad, “Sure, Community Manager works as a title,” is because that is the easy slot to fit myself when explaining what I do for Fedora.

FWIW, this isn’t a game of one up; I’m not bragging about who has how many staff members focused on what activities. I fully expect other distributions to grow their own teams that are similar to our community architects, because it is an elegant solution that works. It’s why we go around giving the talk on “Community Architecture for Fun and Profit,” because we want to share what is working for us, just as we are learning constantly from others.

Filed in Events, Fedora, Linux | | Comments (2) »

Fedora 10 (Cambridge) Alpha release notes

04-Aug-08

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/Alpha/ReleaseNotes

We’re going to keep them editable unless things really get slammed. The new wiki is structured to handle the scale of a release, unlike previous releases, and I’m happy to give it the test under fire.

Something missing? Use the [edit] link. Edit link missing? Try Log in / create account.

Filed in Documentation, Fedora | | Comments Off

3 reasons to help at the LinuxWorld Fedora booth

02-Aug-08

If you are a Fedora friend, Ambassador, or hacker, there are many reasons to take a shift at the Fedora booth in the .Org Pavilion at LWCE SF 2008. Here are three of my favorites:

  1. North American Fedora Ambassadors are in the midst of a nice resurgence, this is a great time to show your mettle and get more deeply involved.
  2. Jack and I will be there, we always know how to have a good time.
  3. Considering which exhibitors are not going to be at LinuxWorld (HP? Sun? Red Hat?) and who is sponsoring and what is being installed at all the official desktop shootouts and installfests, you might consider the Fedora booth to be a great island in a storm of fanboy crap.

The San Francisco show has always been a touchstone of West Coast open source communities, and many are well represented as usual. But the relevance of the show is always in question, especially after the death of the Boston show, which was the last show Red Hat was at. I was there, I saw the tumbleweeds blowing down the aisles. When vendors stop exhibiting at LinuxWorld SF, it makes me wonder. Do they no longer need to prove their open source chops and are ready for the next level? Or are they missing out on actual, qualified sales leads and cannot justify the enormous cost for marketing alone?

I hope that the reports of LinuxWorld’s death in San Francisco are beyond greatly exaggerated, and I’ll continue to do my part to bring open community to the show.

Filed in Events, Fedora, Linux, Marketing | | Comments Off

A word about Intel’s Moblin and Fedora

25-Jul-08

When the Reg article broke about Moblin moving from Ubuntu as a distro base to Fedora, a few people contacted us at the Fedora booth at OSCON to say, “Go talk with those guys right now!” So we did. Folks seem to be wondering similar questions, hopefully this post answers or points in the right direction.

As it happened, at that moment the Moblin project lead Dirk Hohndel was giving a lighting talk + Q&A at the Intel booth, so Greg DeKoenigsberg, John Poelstra, and I went over to hear more and see what we can offer Dirk and his team.

When Dirk asked for questions, Greg said, handing over his business card, “What can we do for you?” Good laugh from Dirk, and he followed with not really surprising and overall good news. He explained that they are already integrated with Fedora where they need to be, as a downstream, and they know who to talk to for getting their changes pushed back in to Fedora. They interact mainly through the kernel team (read: Dave Jones) and otherwise have no problems with being a downstream and doing things the open source way.

In response to a question about specifically why they switched from Ubuntu, Dirk explained that the Reg article was sensationalizing the announcement, the reality is more mundane. There was not a falling out, just a different technological need that is fulfilled by Fedora.

What is that need? To be based on RPM. This is where the discussion got more interesting to me. The Moblin team’s reason for using an RPM-based distro is to be able to build using openSUSE’s Build Service (OBS). Got that? They are moving from Ubuntu-based to Fedora-based so they can build on OBS. Okay …

Dirk had some specific reasons for using OBS, which I wasn’t able to fully-and-digest. Greg heard a bit better, and said he’d get in touch with Jesse Keating about some of it. If more information is needed, one of us can contact Dirk for more details.

Filed in Events, Fedora, FLOSS, Open Source | | Comments (4) »

A travel FAIL

22-Jul-08

After a long run of relatively trouble free travel, though you couldn’t ever tell from my blood pressure, I finally whiffed one this morning. I forgot/underestimated the amount of people traveling at 5 am. The security line was monumental, although it really only took me 30 minutes ot traverse. The whole thing put me up against the wire.

More…

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Deep writer, beat writer — finding your niche in Fedora

21-Jul-08

Some years ago we brought the concept of a beat writer in to Fedora, as a way of merging a tradition from writing with a tradition from open source. By breaking down a monolothic document such as the Fedora release notes in to modular chunks, multiple people can collaborate on the whole document while keeping focused on the content most important to them.

Every single subProject and SIG should have a beat writer.

If you do not, then you have no one committed to telling the world about your great feature, project, process, or whatever. If you want to be under the radar, fine, go ahead. But if anyone is relying upon your technology or efforts, then you owe it to the community to do your documentation.

Not having a beat writer is like a Linux distribution not contributing to the Linux kernel.

In the last release cycle, the features process was a very important and useful way that content about features made it in to the release notes and marketing materials. Here’s a funny story about that:

At the 2008 Red Hat Summit, Jeremy Katz was giving a talk about the Fedora live media feature. In that talk, he mentioned that he wasn’t perfectly satisfied with the state of data persistence in a live USB image at the time of Fedora 9’s release. Thus, he was a little concerned that the feature was highlighted and central to the documentation and marketing content. I sat in the audience and thought, “Ha! Teach you to mark a feature as 100% when it’s really not.”

When we wrote up release notes and marketing material for Fedora 9, we drew directly from the appropriate sections in each feature page. If a feature sponsor puts a note in such as, “Persistence rocks but still has some bugs in these areas …”, you can be 100% sure the release notes and marketing materials are going to reflect that.

The moral here is to own the content that is most important to you so that it says what you mean it to say.

Filed in Documentation, Fedora | | Comments (2) »

Let’s talk about release notes, shall we?

21-Jul-08

This process is really simple:

  1. You write content here.
  2. We edit the heck out of it.
  3. For Alpha and Beta releases, we make a one-page here.
  4. For RC to final, we take all that writing and editing to make up one set of rump-bumping release notes.

People, please! You know something already that should be in the Fedora 10 release notes, now is the time to post it. Not sure what to write or what to do with it? Use one of the six ways to submit a release note.

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OSCON here we come

17-Jul-08

A bunch of us Fedorans are going to be at OSCON next week. The cool Fedora booth! Lots of open source ISVs to ask, “Why aren’t you in Fedora yet?” Free stuff! Hairy booth babes! A trip to the Oregon State University Open Source Labs!!

Aside from the Fedora work, I’ll also be wearing my reporter’s hat for Red Hat Magazine and Dev Fu. Looking for stories, videos, and all the interesting bits I can find.

Best for me, even though I have to come out of my introvert shell to talk with people, I’m going to make sure I’m paired up with one of the nutty extroverts when we talk with ISVs, and I do not have a presentation to prepare for (yay!). Also, the travel is nicely short, no full day used to get there; it should be about 4.5 hours from my house door to meeting up with Jack and Greg at the hotel for the trip to OSU.

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