Best of now and best for seven years

The title of this post is from a comment by Michael Tiemann, referring to Fedora (best of now) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (best for seven years.) It is also symbolic of a useful set of relationships that has grown up around Fedora and Red Hat.

What does Fedora have to do with the enterprise? Isn’t that Red Hat’s game?

In answer, Michael gave a talk at FUDCon that addresses why Fedora is relevant to enterprises today. Especially where they want to be ahead of what is relevant in the future. It’s not about “running Fedora or JBoss.org bits instead of X, Y, or Z”. It’s about how enterprises, by being involved (contributing), take an active role in their own future. They gain a chance to influence, yes, but also to learn from a world class organization, learn everything from content to infrastructure. Benefits include:

• A complete model and tools for developing, testing, and distributing software and other content. That you can use. For free, in all meanings of that word.
• An active lesson in how working with a larger community benefits your organization in the way a tide raises all boats.
• Michael calls this, “a peaceful place for participation.”
• If you only save 50% of what you used to lose in failed and inadequate IT projects, that is still a couple of trillion US dollars back in everyone’s pockets.

After the talk, I asked Michael what he thought about the success of the Java Community Process (JCP) as a comparison. We didn’t have time to discuss that, but perhaps we can pick it back up here on Dev Fu. Our basic conclusion right then was, there are lessons to be learned from the JCP.

Later, in conversation with JBoss.org leader Bob McWhirter, some specific lessons came up. One is that the JCP is of less use to actual developers; in most cases they are shielded from the process and are not influential, with notable exceptions. JCP serves organizations better, especially where an existing codebase is being used to kick-off the process. Most difficult are grassroots efforts, where community developers work through the JCP.

This is a fairly stark contrast to Fedora as it stands and where it is heading. It is very easy for community developers to begin new features and drive them through the process. Organizations are realizing they have these same rights and can drive their ideas through Fedora. The roadmap is open for participation, and developers can make a difference today they benefit from for most of the next decade.

This entry was posted by Karsten Wade on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Developer life, Fedora, Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.