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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Huh. That's surprising to begin with; Fedora is RHEL's upstream, so I just assumed Red Hat was running it. If people wanted to change Fedora in a way that was counter to RH's interest, would it really go through?

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Disclaimer: Former Red Hatter

Yes, as long as it was in the best interest of the Fedora project. A recent example IMHO is the change of default filesystem to btrfs. From Red Hat's perspective a default like XFS or stratis would be better as it would provide more testing/adoption for their recommended RHEL uses. Another might be the creation of a Fedora Server variant which isn't really in the interest of Red Hat.

If there were something good for Fedora that would really hurt Red Hat, I wouldn't expect it to happen, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't also be bad for Fedora. Maybe a Fedora LTS version, but there are other already extant options to address that market so I don't see a need there. I would like to see a Fedora LTS kernel version though that behaved more like Ubuntu's.

> Another might be the creation of a Fedora Server variant which isn't really in the interest of Red Hat.

By that, you mean another server variant than the one day, right? https://getfedora.org/en/server/download/

No, that's the one I was referring to. I was saying the creation of that was not in the interest of red hat, but it happened anyway

Fedora Server was created originally to be the upstream for RHEL's server configuration, but Red Hat lost interest very early on, so it drifted away from that.

Red Hat doesn't generally invest in any Fedora deliverable except Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Workstation these days. All Fedora deliverables are community driven and community controlled.

> Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Workstation

Those seem to me to be the bulk of the work going into Fedora, is that incorrect?

Fedora Cloud and Fedora KDE get a lot of work. But since Red Hat doesn't care about them, there's not as much incentive to highlight what they're doing.

But Fedora Cloud is an Edition again in Fedora 37, and Fedora KDE continues to tick along quite nicely.

I don't know much about Fedora, haven't run it in years. But there are quite a few open source projects that are effectively dominated by RH employees. In a few that I've had interest in, it was pretty clear the direction was being project-managed by RH.

I think they've learned to try to keep it subtle, but they wield a lot of power in the open source world, not just via their distributions and direct contributions.

I've found that every major controversy in Linux can be traced to someone working in redhat or someone working in microsoft.

It's uncanny.

I suppose the more charitable way to look at it is that groups like Red Hat (and now Microsoft) are the ones interesting in paying the people looking to do that work. Which is not to say it doesn't give them a lot of sway, but there's also only so many volunteer hours and you'll inevitably get more work done than others if you're getting paid to do it 40+ hours a week.

It's definitely part of it, the fact that they are major contributors makes their work much more visible. There's some amazing contributions from Redhat employees like Pipewire. They are one of the only companies investing into Linux as a desktop os and, personally, I do appreciate that.

Is there a complete list? I can think of systemd.

> so I just assumed Red Hat was running it. If people wanted to change Fedora in a way that was counter to RH's interest, would it really go through?

No, legally it's all Red Hat et al

Fedora Project isn't an association in the same way Debian is, it is in house project of Red Hat. Look at what happened to CentOS, in the same vein they can steer it however they like.

Yeah, I didn't write it in my first comment but I was very much thinking of the "Community" Enterprise Operating System and where that went when I wrote it. It can be Red Hat's or the community's, but in the end it can't be both.

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