Thilo Pfennig wrote:
As things are today (see thread Re: directions in Fedora desktop project), it seems if users who want to contribute to Fedora but want to contribute would have to make a community version of the community project Fedora. I am not saying that I think that this sounds good or makes sense.
It doesnt. We already have hundreds of non Red Hat contributors in Fedora and this is a constantly growing number. The proposal to merge core and extras is a important effort that would strongly move Fedora more into the community front.
Generally said I would like a project that takes the software that Fedora has and built a community and distribution of its own. So this project would not have to follow any of the considerations that Red Hat or Fedora Board has ever taken. I would enable everybody to contribute, again. So something like Fedora Unity but with a different flavour and sure no Fedora in its name or logo, although following some Fedora paths in future development. As I have heard making branches of Fedora should become easier. Maybe this would be a choice?
The goals and benefits of such a fork is not very clear and unless those are clearly stated, it would be difficult to gather any interest in such a effort. Your only major contention about Fedora seems to from misconceptions about the CLA which is a legal safety mechanism used by a large number of Free software projects including Apache, Openoffice.org etc[1]. We havent heard many complaints about the CLA itself but there is some difficulties especially for non technical folks in the process of signing a CLA and joining the various sub projects due to the disconnected nature of these systems and there is a effort to fix that[2].
If you want to focus your efforts on a derivative distribution, there is a large number of them already which you could contribute[3] and we are working on creating tools such as Pilgrim and Pungi that would help the community do this more easily[4]. So if indeed you would like to go this route, the choice is already exercised very well.
Rahul
[1]https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-desktop-list/2006-November/msg00081.h... [2]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/OpenId [3]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions [4]http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/ReleaseProcess