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“For the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.” is a fallacy. It is actually for the major political organizations, the billionaires who sponsor their candidates, and the corporations. People have no or virtually zero input.

But absolutely, the Linux community is different, and much more of a teamwork between hardware / software manufactures (The producers) and the end-users (we software developers and non-technical consumers). Still, there is the beginning of the disappearance of gpl3 type democracy.

Nowadays, we see the creeping commercialization of Linux, where some distributions provide a base level for free, and demand payments for the upgrade. That is the same pattern that the American founding fathers were aware would occur, and it did occur.

I am a 20 year Fedora user. I have to say that my role, as end-user, was to use Linux, suggest improvements, and report bugs. I have been delighted with the Fedora software that RedHat has sponsored. I make daily use of the desktop environment, and with a small family server component.

It is the organizations that funds Linux, not through charity, but motivated by business and competitive pressures that brings new features. Just think of software security, of program correctness, of system maintenance, and system deployment and who needed these improvements.

To the above, there is also the progression of electronic hardware as shown by the chip manufactures and the peripheral manufacturers. In the modern internet world, there is a general need for “smaller, faster and better”.

My role since retirement.
In the past, I have read and edited the admin guides from Fedora, as well as those from across the ocean. I have done that activity in English, French and Spanish languages. I have reviewed mathematics papers and software as well.

But to my disappointment, the editing tools that I use are not officially supported by the organization(s). Thus, my corrections or subject-matter reorganization remain my own or shared with few friends.

I definitely want to work more closely with Fedoraforum.org. But, too much of the collaboration tools are not suited for the “end-user”. For example,
I use libreOffice against copies of the various Fedora publications. I use the “track changes” and comments facilities to mark up grammar errors, or ask for clarification. My editing is a teamwork between partners strong in grammar and software engineering. Yet, asciidoc, a software that is for publishing corrected results, does not really offer tools for an “editor collaboration team” role.

PS, I have written utilities, and share them between friends. I do want to provide feedback based on my 60+ years of software engineering. And yes, I will continue to provide constructive feedback whenever the opportunity prevails.

I’ve been using Fedora since Barry was in office, and I’d poked it as early as F17, before the big split.
As it stands, there’s always been a stigma of gatekeeping around the Linux community, of which is not helped when entire developer groups appear to literally live to that stigma, turning what should be free coding into a dogma.

Quite simply, I’ve become out of touch with what passes for modern communication platforms. And I’m about as social as LT is Finnish. I enjoy the semi-anonymity bridged here without the obligation to go any further.

And then you have people like RMS who make it weird and awkward for everyone.

I feel if I were to join the conversation, that I’d come quickly to butting heads, especially over what would be deemed priorities and worthless trends in my own eyes. I have for example, loudly advocated against the primary desktop environment of Fedora.

I like how transparent the KDE team is on everything from bugfixes to their looks ahead. It makes it look like a nice unified front where things make sense, instead of a secretive cabal where it takes 20 years to fix a longstanding bug because that simply is not the will of their universe or something, even if it would have taken a 15 minute session to fix.

I’m also not a coder, so I’d feel double excluded. The most I’ve done are simple batch scripts. This loops back around to prioritizing and butting heads, because I imagine there’s a bureaucratic nature to why packages that haven’t been updated since 2006 are still in the repositories, why FVWM hasn’t been updated to 3, or why many free/open source typefaces are missing, or why Flatpak exists.

I know the SiGs exist, but a part of me wonders if that’s the right methodology. I don’t know how other distros organize themselves, and I feel that some of the work is redundant or should be platform agnostic.

This is a wonderful idea. I think it will prove very beneficial for Fedora and for everyone involved. I’m retired and looking for ideas to keep me active physically and mentally. I’ve ruled out a lot of activities. What I’ve decided to do and am doing is to learn Fedora Linux and the Rust Language. My goal is to write utilities that will make Fedora run faster than Apple and to measure performance. I have set up a workshop in my home in Southern California. I have an Apple Mac, I have Fedora 37 running on both Intel and ARM machines. I also have Windows 11 running on both Intel and ARM. Forunatly none of this needs to be on-line very often, just for updates. On-line I use ChromeOS Flex on an Intel based machine. All of my systems have both C and Rust Compilers…..Ira

Tell me something: isn’t Red Hat part of Kyndryl? And aren’t a lot of Fedora project managers just paid Red Hat employees?

From what I hear from people, Kyndryl isn’t doing well as a company. They’ve had MANY layoffs lately. There are pretty well zero engineers and general IT workers left in Canada, and even overseas workers are getting laid off (not really “laid off”, just terminated). From the information I’m getting from workers on the inside who manage some of the big client contracts are having their teams eliminated out from under them, they’re saying that Kyndryl looks to be set up for failure and dissolution by management. If that happens, doesn’t Red Hat go down the drain, and those paid employees managing some of the biggest Linux projects don’t have a job? This spells disaster for the Linux community as a whole since much of the core parts and major projects for Linux distributions both big and small come from Red Hat employees.

What is your take on this?