Re:Leaderless Debian
by ilovecaching on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @11:43AM
(#19369259)
I guess I don't understand, because Fedora is also a community driven project. Anyone can contribute to packaging, steering, designing, etc. not just Redhat employees.
Fedora was not the one making the decisions in regard to the rather specialized area of initial boot. Why that is can only be speculated, but I would hazard a guess that when there is an incentive conflict between what is best for redhat and what is best for fedora, focus of both will go where they align. Path of least resistance and all that.
I would also guess that the small number of developers that work within such niche area was basically all hired by redhat during the earlier days. Not with nefarious intention mind you but simply out of good business practice.
A good example is the Initramfs-tools that debian created. Before (most, all?) distros just had a bunch of shell scripts mostly concatenated together, but hard coding that for every possible configuration that Debian allows was painful for the maintainers so they created initramfs-tools. They did not have a bunch of consultants which could sell handcrafted solutions to customers.
Red Hat decided many years later to create a similar solutions, but for "reasons" did not want to port initramfs-tools and created Dracut. Debian is now considering porting dracut since maintaining initramfs-tools is a lot of work which could be spent elsewhere. The debconf bof on that was basically the maintainer asking "OK, anyone interesting in continuing maintaining initramfs? How did the test port of dracut go?".
The incentives and politics in a community project are very different from those within a company. Not always better for everybody, but very distinct.