Spins as features?

I’ve been giving this topic some thought after discussions with John Poelstra. Right now, spin owners create a full feature page, and then run it through the feature process, except that the feature isn’t voted on by FESCo. After the Spins SIG makes sure it’s in proper working order, gets a trademark blessing by the Board, and goes to release engineering for inclusion.

I wonder if we could improve on this process in a few ways:

• A slimmer page for the spin owner, that’s a closer match to the needs of that group as opposed to platform features. What does that page need? I think the Spins SIG probably has the answers, but certainly there are fewer needed for spins than in the case of features.
• A slimmer process, separate from the feature process, so that it’s not confusing for the feature wrangler or people who are perusing our feature pages. This might be even more important if we start trying to manage the Fedora 11 feature process before Fedora 10 GA. (Which I think is a pretty decent idea.)

When we get new trademark guidelines in place, I suspect we’re going to be able to cut out gating on the Board, definitely slimming the process. Until then the Board will do its best to keep up with all pending spin requests at the weekly meetings.

Might for right.

Someone just passed along this link to a decision in the Jacobsen v. Katzer case. I haven’t had time to read the whole thing yet, but the Court of Appeals vacated and remanded the case, meaning they found the District Court of N. California erred in declaring the Artistic License “intentionally broad.” This bodes well for a wide range of other open source licenses including our beloved GPLs and BSDs. It’s still possible this decision could be appealed, nevertheless, but for today things are looking up. Groklaw has an article here.

And then the C.H.U.D.s came.

Spent all day at a conference at my old office — an outreach of sorts from Red Hat to do a technology briefing and information exchange. Best not to dwell on that right now, except to say that I came home an hour before dinner, caught up with John Poelstra and my email, and now I am getting ready to put the kids to bed and need a breather.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend triaging bugs, and got through about 50 or so. It was very empowering being able to take simple action to move some problems along! I highly recommend it — it’s possible to do between 15 and 25 an hour, maybe more if you’re really hardcore about it. I’m still a little tentative at times but striving to do the right thing.

Features!

If you’re a developer with a feature that you want in Fedora 10, it would be a good idea for you to get that feature page fixed up, and moved into the proper wiki category. The last FESCo meeting before feature freeze happens on Wednesday, so don’t delay — those pages need to be ready by… well, by today, but shh, I won’t tell if the Feature Wrangler doesn’t notice.

In the future, everyone will be wearing them.

I was happy to see in his latest blog entry that spot’s checking out fedora-list. It would be super if more Fedora luminaries were triaging that list from time to time. Certainly it takes some time, but the more people that are skimming it, the more chance that we can deliver needed wisdom to the new users who frequent that list. And as always, we want to encourage a positive environment for the users there, so if you do decide to drop by, please be kind and polite, the way that would make your moms proud.

Editorial fail.

Given yesterday morning’s news, I was a little shocked to see this in today’s paper.

Should have kept that title in reserve.

YouTube is starting come in really handy for local politics these days. Here’s a doozy from my neck of the woods. Apparently the fact that our county has the #1 business growth rate in Virginia must have nothing to do with the fact that this is one of the only counties in the state that has no BPOL (Business/Professional Occupational License) tax. So along comes Stafford’s own BPOL tax to solve that problem — and it’s a tax on gross receipts, not net!

That’s OK, I guess we’d rather encourage everybody to simply get their cars onto I-95 to work up north in D.C. After all, what does more local small business get us anyway? They simply take up space where we could put more MegaMarts, create tax revenue, and enliven the community. I sincerely doubt that the four imbeciles on the Board of Supervisors who approved this insanity will retain their seats in the next election.

This. Is. STAFFORD!

I can’t believe a week without a decent blog entry. I am so sorry, my sweet Intartubez. Never again with the forsaking, I swear it! Now that I have been firmly ensconced back in my lair for half a fortnight, let me catch you up on my life, here and now.

Last week I was in Westford, MA for a managerial catch-up at da Hat. It was a wonderful and magical experience, full of wonder and delight. No, really! Let me give you the brief run-down, since a lot of it is mostly boring… I want the community to know that I do it all for you, brothers and sisters:

Sunday: I had no idea before this trip that JetBlue was a verb, but oh did I find out today. For me, it was a 6-hour delay, 3 spent on the tarmac waiting to take off. One day there will be wifi on planes and this won’t be such a big deal. Got into Boston at 10:30pm instead of 4:45pm. Get my rental car and burn rubber for Westford. Only it’s a Chevy Cobalt and burning rubber really consists of me holding a stick with acorns tied to it in front of the hood so the team of five scrawny squirrels runs faster.

Monday to Friday:LOTS OF MEETINGS. There’s really no reason to treat all these days separately, because it’s all just a huge blur of circumnavigating the brief blank spots in my calendar. Meetings with friends. Meetings with managers. Meetings with people I only know from video screens. Trying to make sure that Fedora is treating everyone, including people inside Red Hat, as full-fledge members of a community trying to build the best damn Linux technologies on the planet. Mostly succeed. Also trying to make sure that people in Red Hat are doing their best to engage the community and drive awareness of the huge amount of very cool work going on in-house, and the dedication in this company for free and open source software. Again, mostly succeed. Also, trying to put together a team lunch. Mostly FAIL, until Friday when things work out better and we all enjoy some good Indian food and a mango pudding that reigns supreme. Somehow I manage to miss spending much time with our awesome Anaconda team, for which I am ashamed. Friday night, travel home and miraculously am not JetBlued (check it out, Mo!). In fact, flight gets in early.

The week was an enormous success in part because this time around, rather than crashing with a friend (in particular, both spot and lxmaier have put me up, or should I say put up with me, in the past), I got an actual hotel just a few miles from the office. This meant I could continue my normal practice of getting up at 6:00am and arriving in the office by 7:00am. I try never to waste Red Hat’s money, and in this case, their outlay for a hotel room for me each night translated directly into 4 hours of extra work, before you count the work I did at the hotel itself. So basically, I got my normal 12-hour day in, and could make up for my relatively glacial pace, compared to my co-workers, through the benefit of sheer hours.

Weekend: A blur, but other than some catch-up email on Saturday I manage to avoid the computer for a little while. I drive up to Reston to rehearse with a friend’s 80s cover band, which is very diverting. We have a new female lead singer who rocks hard, and I have a great time although I wish we’d all learned more tunes. It works out OK because some people have to blow early.

Back to the present.

This week I spent a lot of time on something very important to me, the trademark guidelines for Fedora. It’s vital that we get this problem solved, because it is — well, if not a blocker, than certainly a speed bump — for all sorts of other things that are interesting to the community. Those things include custom spins, fan sites, business cards, and all sorts of other fascinating applications for Fedora’s infinitely appealing features. And darned if I didn’t make some progress. The way I see it, we want to minimize the difficulty for people to make use of the trademarks — and in a lot of cases, if I have my way, we’ll be removing the need for onerous approvals and making things simple. Specifically, we’ll hopefully have some sort of secondary mark for Fedora-derived spins — this directly empowers people in the appliance space, and IHVs and ISVs that are trying to deliver leading-edge solutions and development kits to their particular audiences.

A couple news articles I saw this week, and the excellent and productive time I spent in Massachusetts last week, prompt me to finish out this catch-up blog with a little stint on my personal soapbox. I’ve been active in the Fedora community for nearly five years, and I’ve never been prouder to be a part of it. If I weren’t working for Red Hat, I would still be hanging out with you guys — albeit more outside my work hours. This community is full of enthusiastic, talented, and ambitious people who know what it means to truly “walk the walk” of free and open source software. This community is made great by the people in it, who believe that Fedora is not just something you use, it’s an expression of ideas, something you believe in — the idea that we all have the power to make a difference in the world, and it starts by taking action, by giving something back. Contribution over consumption, giving over taking, enabling over using. I’m proud to hang my hat in Fedora — the reasons for that are numerous. The vast majority of those reasons are going to read this, and wonder if I’m talking about them. Assume the answer is “yes.” Now go forth and conquer!

FUDCon Brno 2008 hotel.

For those of you attending FUDCon Brno 2008, please go to the wiki page and indicate the exact nights you need hotel accommodations. We need this for planning purposes, by August 15. Thank you!

Chatty Cathies.

Another month gone so soon? Apparently so, since the Board will hold a public IRC meeting on Tuesday, August 12th, at 1800 UTC (2:00 p.m. US Eastern). We look forward to seeing you there!

_{Yes, this blog entry comes with the full knowledge that I still need to catch up from last week. Soon, my precious intarwebz!}