Council hackfest in late CY2019
by Ben Cotton
Followin up from today's meeting, let's start trying to figure out a
Council hackfest toward the end of this year.
Matthew has expressed a desire to not have it in October due to
personal obligations. I'm also going to have a fairly busy October, so
I'd echo that. I'm also going to be busy in September through November
covering a teammate's program while he's participating in an temporary
assignment.
Early December seemed to work well last time. So perhaps the first or
second week of December might work again? Alternatively, I suspect
many of us will be at DevConf.cz and then FOSDEM, so a central Europe
location between those two weekends might work well. Even though it's
in calendar 2020, it's still in the same fiscal year (FY2020).
The F31 elections, based on the current schedule will end on 6
December. This means we could potentially be holding the meeting as
Dennis's term on the Council ends if we do a December meeting.
--
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Fedora Program Manager
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis
4 years, 4 months
New plan for the future of objectives reports (and editions too!)
by Matthew Miller
Hi Objective leads, Edition leads, and Council representatives!
I’d like to try something new to replace some of our meetings.
Every four weeks, the Fedora Council has a meeting devoted to Objectives
updates, and in a separate meeting a similar thing for the Engineering and
Mindshare sides of the project and the Diversity and Inclusion team. The
idea is that this gives these leads the opportunity to share the current
status of their work with the Council and the community at-large. However,
these meetings are sometimes hard for people to attend and don’t provide
updates in a reliable or consumable way.
I have asked the FPgM (hi Ben!) to create a repository[1] that leads can use
to provide updates. Each Objective and Edition has a file with a “traffic
light” status indicator (red, yellow, or green) and the ability to provide
status information. I’d like to ask you all to update this file at the end
of each week. (That is, every Friday, please.)
Nothing complicated: just make sure the color is right for your current
status (green: on track, everything is cool; yellow: there’s something that
might be a concern and the Council should be aware; red: there’s an active
problem and help from the Council is needed).
The idea behind this is that you won’t have to think back too far about what
has happened. About once a month, Ben will aggregate your status updates
into a post on the Community Blog so that we can share this information with
the Fedora community.
We'd like to have this for the Council Objectives, but also for the official
Fedora Editions, and for Mindshare and Engineering overall from the Council
representatives for those areas. (I'm posting this to the council list but
will also send privately or to area mailing lists because I know it's hard
to keep up with all the lists!)
We want to make it easy for you to report what is going on in your area and
for the community to find it. With this, we’ll be able to publish your
current status to docs.fedoraproject.org and the regular Community Blog
posts will give a meaningful diff to the community. If you have suggestions
for how we can improve this process, please let us know.
[1] https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/status_reports
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
4 years, 4 months
Fedora and Steam
by Matthew Miller
So, a lot of people have been asking me about this! Steam, of course, is a a
popular platform for gaming, and it runs on Linux. Valve, the company behind
it, puts a lot of resources into gaming on Linux (including working on open
source video drivers). Until now, they'd explicitly endorsed and supported a
specific non-Fedora Linux distro. However, there's been some changes
which you can read about in this forum post:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/1640915206447625383/,
which says in part:
The Linux landscape has changed dramatically since we released the
initial version of Steam for Linux, and as such, we are re-thinking how
we want to approach distribution support going forward. There are several
distributions on the market today that offer a great gaming desktop
experience such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and many others.
We'll be working closer with many more distribution maintainers in the
future. [...]
Several people have suggested to me that it'd be awesome for a Fedora
offering to be _the_ supported Steam distribution. Or at least, a formally
recommended one. I can definitely see the appeal -- although we haven't
targetted gamers formally except through the Games spin (which showcases
open source gaming), gaming is generally pretty important to the
student/academic audience we'd like to reach.
But, of course, Steam is a proprietary platform, and gaming comes with the
large elephant-in-the-room that is Nvidia. Despite awesomeness from the AMD
open source driver recently, and Intel integrated video good enough for a
lot of basic gaming, Nvidia still has a near monopoly.
I don't have any specific requests or direction from the informal
conversations we've had with Valve so far, but I imagine that in order to
really make a Fedora edition or spin their official recommendation, they'd
want some kind of consideration given to problems that might come up with
their proprietary system (or with the Nvidia driver). We've traditionally
had bright line here, where while we may provide advice and point to
workarounds when there's a problem with popular proprietary software (like
Steam games, even -- see this from F26
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F26_bugs), we don't block or slip the
release for them.
I know this a contentious topic with a lot of different opinions, but let's
not let that stop us from talking about it. What _are_ our options here, and
what are we willing to do?
For example, maybe we would not slip the general release, but would allow a
Fedora-branded spin to delay release until some bug is worked out. Or, we
could decide that we want to stick to our all-open-source criterion but
interested teams could work with Valve to be aware of our release schedule
and make sure they're able to test and get things working _before_ we hit
release freeze. If it comes to it, maybe we'd allow Fedora editions or spins
that want to and which have Steam installed from a third-party repository to
warn of potential problems before upgrading. These are just some thoughts,
not specific plans.... I can imagine a range of possibilities.
In any case, let's talk about the pros and cons here and what we can gain
for Fedora and for our open source and free software cause, and what we're
able to do within our values to accomplish that.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
4 years, 4 months
Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora
by Matthew Miller
Today marks a new day in the 26-year history of Red Hat. IBM has
finalized its acquisition of Red Hat, which will operate as a distinct
unit within IBM.
What does this mean for Red Hat’s participation in the Fedora Project?
In short, nothing.
Red Hat will continue to be a champion for open source, just as it
always has, and valued projects like Fedora that will continue to play
a role in driving innovation in open source technology. IBM is
committed to Red Hat’s independence and role in open source software
communities. We will continue this work and, as always, we will
continue to help upstream projects be successful and contribute to
welcoming new members and maintaining the project.
In Fedora, our mission, governance, and objectives remain the same. Red
Hat associates will continue to contribute to the upstream in the same
ways they have been.
We will do this together, with the community, as we always have.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about today’s news, I
encourage you to review the materials below. For any questions not
answered here, please feel free to contact us. Red Hat CTO Chris Wright
will host an online Q&A session in the coming days where you can ask
questions you may have about what the acquisition means for Red Hat and
our involvement in open source communities. Details will be announced
on the Red Hat blog.
* Press release: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-landmark-acquis...
* Blog from Chris Wright: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-and-ibm-accelerating-adoption-open...
* FAQ: https://community.redhat.com/blog/2019/07/faq-for-communities/
Regards,
Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader
Brian Exelbierd, Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
4 years, 5 months
future council meeting plan, part two
by Matthew Miller
The weekly status reports will replace the Objectives meeting and the
Mindshare/Engineering/D&I readout meeting. Especially that last one was
useful for _me_ to keep up in as the slides-and-jitsi format, but I don't
think it was really broadly helpful to the rest of the project (and
therefore a lot of work from the representatives going to not much return.)
Ben and I were talking and we suggest combining the tickets & ongoing
meeting and open floor meetings into one, with about half the time for
tickets. We'll have to keep better meeting discipline and watch the clock
for each one, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. What do you think?
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader
4 years, 5 months