It’s deeply disturbing to see “us” fighting each other. There is no reason to believe people are angry for nothing. There is something that’s not going well. But, let’s stop calling each other names, which is making things nastier.
For a moment, let’s set aside all the politics, ego and tensions prevailing in the community. Let’s take a step back and let’s see this with a stupidly simple view.
Contributing to fedora is fun for only one reason, everyone who has an idea can pursue it. Right? Most of the people in fedora community are extremely talented people and many of them don’t get paid for what they are doing. Except for a lucky few, this is true for people within and outside RedHat. Still people contribute, not because they have nothing else to do, but because they love fedora and it’s another way of expressing themselves.
It’s pretty normal to get angry when one is stopped from expressing what he/she likes. I have seen the project growing, with more people, came more number of steps to ensure chaos does not happen. This slowed down all the people and ensuring exactly the thing we wanted to avoid, chaos.
Reduce the bottlenecks. I have been pushing this for long, but which have not happened so far. Whenever you make someone wait in the queue for weeks, it takes the fun away and make them angry. Try to take decisions as fast as possible.
It takes a lot to gain trust. So, people who are unknown to the community, are not trusted. If people feel that the decisions are coming from people whom they don’t know, there would be grudges, even if they are people form another FOSS community. Run every decision through the community. Not that I love long threads, I hate them, but that is the only way to keep community informed in such a huge, global and diverse community. If you can not convince majority of the community, it is not good for the project, no matter how brilliant the idea is.
Most importantly, let the community decide what they want to do. What does that exactly mean? Whenever someone is standing up and trying to do something, the default choice should be “yes” instead of “let’s review” or “this is not our policy” or “this can not be done for this reason”.
I have no idea how much this post will help in making things reasonable. I don’t think it will, but one can always try. 🙂
The Diary of a Nobody 