Required merriment.

I know it’s been said many times today, but happy 20th birthday, Linux. You’ve given me two great careers thus far and I’ve enjoyed a lot of learning and achievement thanks to the hard work of all the people that contributed to you.

Remember to raise a toast to our penguin pal this weekend!

Well deserved thanks.

Short and belated post: I wanted to give some sincere and heartfelt gratitude to the sysadmins for Fedora that keep our infrastructure in tip top condition daily. Sorry I missed saying this on SysAdmin day, but you guys just rock! Thanks for all you do for us, seen and unseen.

Free hugs.

Now that’s a nice way to go on Valentine’s Day! I love my wife a lot more, of course, but I’m also proud to say that I love free software.

My most sincere thanks to all the people in Fedora and the free software community who work hard every day to make free software better. The daily effort you put in has inspired me and changed my life. Consider this your hug, and have a great Valentine’s Day.

Schedule change.

As seen on the official announcement list, the final release of Fedora 13 will be postponed by a one-week slip. As the announcement notes, the blocker bug list is not empty, which means that according to our F13 final release criteria, we slip the release.

It's always disappointing when we don't hit our original target, but these criteria allow us to focus on objective markers to measure our readiness. It was a pleasure sitting in that readiness meeting tonight with some very smart people, because it was focused on the worthy goal of dispassionately measuring our status based on the ruler we've set for ourselves.

I suspect as we go we'll need to tune release criteria in certain areas where we want more detail. Tonight, for intance, we found there was at least one place where the written criteria could be clearer about their intent. There is a retrospective scheduled for QA after the release of Fedora 13, at which we can note some of the discrepancies and tune as needed.

This iterative approach has worked very well for our release schedule, which I'd really like to see us let stand for a few releases, as we consider other changes. Thanks to all of the people who participate in the process — the teams of people working on QA, Release Engineering, Anaconda, kernel, and countless other packages for our release. The collaboration that's gone on this release has been tremendous, and Fedora 13 is shaping up to be spectacular as a result!

Great contributors, part 102.

I wanted to give a special shout of thanks and gratitude to Sijis Aviles of Chicago, Illinois (USA) and Hiemanshu Sharma of Bangalore, India. They’ve been intimately involved with work on redesigning pieces of the Fedora websites. They’ve demonstrated an enormous amount of ambition, effort, persistence, elbow grease, patience, and just darn good spirits in helping out. Together and separately, they’ve done work on the Spins sites, other coding work for the redesign process, and general upkeep throughout the fedoraproject.org domain.

Thanks to both of you for being such great contributors to Fedora!

There are many stories in Fedora just like this one that deserve telling, but I had a few minutes to make an entry, and these two wonderful individuals just happened to be on my mind at the time. Who’s someone in Fedora on your mind today that you don’t think people hear enough about?

“C” is not just for cookie.

“C” also stands for “Community.” Why bring this up now? Because along with Leonidas roaring to life this week, we also have some other great news to share with our (little-”c”) community members:

Fedora Community – the new collaboration site for Fedora contributors! Fedora Community is powered by Moksha, a new, revolutionary, and 100% free software web framework that will deliver on the promise of a true infrastructure of participation.

As with all the code we build in the Fedora Project, Fedora Community is 100% free and open source software, from soup to nuts, with no proprietary bits, and no closed back ends. Because it’s built in part from best-of-breed free software solutions like Python, Turbogears, jQuery, ToscaWidgets, AMQP, and others, it provides an incredible amount of flexibility, power, and simplicity for anyone wanting to extend it.

Over the coming months, the brainshare behind Fedora Community will be showing our contributors how they can create new and exciting capabilities for the portal using Moksha. Even though the site currently focuses on software maintenance, in the future our community will be able to solve myriad problems with the tools it showcases. Translators, writers, designers, community organizers, system administrators — all of our groups of crafty contributors will be able to make use of the platform for real-time collaboration.

The site is not perfect yet, but it was important to everyone working on it to give the community a full experience of what the future has in store, as close to the F11 release as possible. And we can’t wait to see what our community does with it next!

I want to thank the Fedora Community team, John ‘J5′ Palmieri, Mairin Duffy, Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, and Luke Macken, for their tireless work on this new system, and for the innovation in the new Moksha framework, which has application far beyond Fedora Community (check out CIVX for a taste thereof). I also want to give special thanks to the intrepid and ever-vigilant Fedora Infrastructure team, which pulled out all the stops to get this site out — in the midst of record-breaking traffic due to the Fedora 11 release. You guys are the bee’s knees!

Do I sound excited? Oh yes, my friends. The infrastructure of participation has arrived — where it goes next is up to you.

Get your goggles on.

Tomorrow is the day — Fedora 11 roars into action! Make sure that you fire up your BitTorrent client and seed for others; help to spread the love!

I want to take a moment to thank each and every person who supported this release — whether it was by writing code, filing a bug, triaging said bug, translating text, working with press, writing or editing the wiki and other docs, testing packages or releases, spreading media and message, organizing events or release parties, helping users, or any of the other activities that make Fedora an incredible and vibrant community.

Thank you for everything you do to make Fedora wonderful. We’re happy and lucky to have you with us on this journey. If you enjoy the release only a tenth as much as I enjoy working with all of you, I have no doubt this will be our most popular release yet.

See you on the tubez tomorrow!