Hello again! Sorry, it's been a very busy month. From my initial observations I have decided to move on from this project, but I wanted to share some feedback with you before I go.
After spending some time getting to know Fedora and the community I came to see that not only do Red Hat employees contribute to the project - which is known and expected - but some of them appear to be taking leading positions. This gives the impression that a private company has implicit control over the direction of Fedora, with employees assigned to work on the project as part of their work responsibility. I hope that my impression is wrong, because in my opinion it would not be an exaggeration to claim that implicit control is implicit ownership. Let's assume in the best case scenario that Red Hat employees are volunteering of their own volition, completely outside of the realm of the responsibilities agreed upon with their employer. This amounts to unpaid work provided to Red Hat indirectly by their employees. More importantly, however, there would still be a division between paid and unpaid volunteers. In any case, volunteers that are not employed by Red Hat are still contributing their work to a private company. Thus, they are contributing to their profits, which subsequently influences the salaries of those volunteers that are employed directly by Red Hat. To put it bluntly, from my analysis this could amount to an exploitative relationship on multiple levels - between paid and unpaid volunteers, between Red Hat and its employees, and between Red Hat and all volunteers. I may have misconceived the situation, but I am suggesting that it is Fedora's (and also Red Hat's) responsibility to clear this misconception in a public and easily accessible manner and to make the nature of this relationship more explicit to prospective volunteers so that they not be misled or even potentially exploited. It may even be helpful going forward to define new terms such as POSS (Private and open-source software) so that the greater open-source community can become conscious of - and possess greater discernment as to - whether or not they are being taken advantage of. Thank you for your time. Peace! _______________________________________________ fedora-join mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected] Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure
