Jonathan Basse wrote:

Hello there,

Beside my role of TAM for Red Hat one of my customer came with the following question on my @fedoraproject.org address.

As I am not really sure how to deal with that any advice would be much appreciate !

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as we disscussed, I'm very intressed to hear how company's can best help the community.

What lack the Fedora Community to be more successfull in producing a rock solid Linux Distribution, As foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

I d'like to make a proposal how we can give the community somthing back

thx for your feedback mike"

I think there's a couple of things a company could do to help the community. In no particular order:

1) Use Fedora intensively, ranging from just developers' (should they have any) and administrators' workstations to end-user desktops. The experience they gain with using Fedora this way will gain them Red Hat Enterprise Linux experience in the long run, as there's usually no surprise to be found in RHEL for anyone intensively using Fedora. The community gains a relatively large, corporate party that can contribute back in ways ranging from logging bugs they encounter on various hardware, and with various software, actively searching for bugs in packages or the distribution itself, writing documentation, bug triaging and patching software either upstream or in Fedora, packaging software from upstream or becoming upstream for the software a company might consider to open-source and license Free, all the way to actively developing new technologies the company finds interesting -or is just willing to invest in, for the greater good. It is up to the company how deeply they want to get involved, and either way it's rewarding in that the newest technologies Fedora brings you now, will at some point end up in mainstream. This is the easiest way of contributing back to the community; it requires little commitment in accepting that it will not work flawlessly at all times, and it can easily change from passive participant to active contributor and back.

2) Aid in fairly straightforward business on Fedora's side; I'm not saying these are simple tasks (it's closer to the other extreme) but for a company I'm thinking letting that system administrator participate in -for example- Fedora's Infrastructure team is fairly easy.

3) Develop software using Fedora, or develop software especially for Fedora. Either join an existing project and improve it in ways only companies have use-cases for (RH Emerging Technologies does this kind of thing), or develop FOSS software to be used with Fedora. This doesn't necessarily have to happen at the enterprise or corporate level; some of my customers will let me spend some of my time on contributing stuff that doesn't have anything to do with their business.

4) Weigh-in; actively participating in discussions, raising new ideas and spending some effort on pursuing what the company thinks should happen is certainly valuable. It brings a new pair of eyes to the table, hopefully looking at things a little differently. This of course ranges from participating in Marketing efforts, to raising new ideas on fedora-devel-list or evaluating new features to be added to Fedora during it's development cycle.

5) Of course, corporate resources in form of sponsorship are welcome too ;-) If a company does not have developers or Linux-savvy administrators, or it doesn't consider the type of effort involved with FOSS to fit with the company profile, contributing back is as simple as saying "Hey, what do you need? I might have a little something for you."

My $.02 ;-)

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen -kanarip