On Thu, 2003-10-09 at 17:27, David.Grudek@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Currently they are all maintained by Redhat but since they plan on turning
> it over to the public more, that will be a harder task to watch what all
> these guys are doing to every package that comes out.
So, you think we're in total control of the disto? That we write every
line of code in the hundreds of packages we ship? Let me tell you right
now: We don't.
We ship free software. This software is written by thousands of
contributors, many of them totally out of our control. Do you think that
means that these packages will be unstable crap because we don't control
them? No? Then why do you think someone helping us to package the
software would?
Having the community working on a project does *not* mean that anyone
can do whatever they want with it. This will be true for Fedora as much
as for e.g. the Gnome project. When I get a patch for Nautilus (which
I maintain in the Gnome project) from some random person I review it for
correctness and send back comments, only if its good (and typically it
takes a few tries to get it good) it gets committed to cvs. No unknown
persons gets to fuck around with it however they want. If someone has
shown a lot of sense and good technical quality I might let them commit
their work directly to cvs, but these are generally people I know and
trust well.
I find it amazing that people posting to this list, who obviously must
be know about Linux has such a complete mistrust in the core ideas of
Free Software. One of the basic ideas of free software is that if the
community works together we can make better software. The reason it
works is that, generally, competent experienced people maintain the
software, and their main task is to say "no" to bad changes.
The belief that some company is better at coding/packaging than everyone
else leads to something much like a proprietary system, but where the
company also throws out the code when its done, for the users to look
at. The power of Free software comes from the community participating in
the development.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Alexander Larsson Red Hat, Inc
alexl@xxxxxxxxxx alla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
He's a hate-fuelled small-town master criminal in a wheelchair. She's a
strong-willed winged traffic cop on her way to prison for a murder she didn't
commit. They fight crime!
