The Truth about Truth

I arrived in Holland last night pretty late, and so far i've been keeping a low internet presence just getting myself moved in. Tomorrow I should be back in full force doing Fedora related hacking.

As I promised, I said I would explain what I meant by 'Truth Happens'. The truth is that a community oriented model of development with a strong emphasis on letting the community decide what to do with itself is a far more effective model for not only development but also marketing. Fedora had a very clear and strong presence at LinuxTag, and everyone I spoke to understood this. The fun part is that this entire effort was engineered by the community. From Fedora bathrobes to the unavoidable digs about being the 'Blue Man Group', it's easy to see that we are making a good impression in Europe.

The best part, though, is the response I got from SuSE and Novell. As some of you may already know, openSuSE is going to ship Smolt with the 11.0 release and enable it in the installer in the 11.1 version. On Saturday, I headed up to the SuSE room to have a chat with one of the managers to find out how well it was working for them. One thing I wanted to find out about was if they wanted to send any patches. Before I even got a chance to ask, Klaas Freitag asked me right out if we would accept patches. I was astonished. After Fosdem, Mike and I had a nailbiting couple of months wondering if they would just take our work and run away with it. Here I was being asked by a competing organisation if we could just collaberate instead.

It's starting to seem that openSuSE is understanding the idea behind a community effort. Perhaps they understood it 2 years ago and waited to see if we could succeed, or perhaps they just figured it out. I don't know. What I do know though, is that seeing how we've succeeded, they are willing to do the same.

There were also a number of other things that were discussed between several different people on both sides of the fence. I'm going to let them talk about it more, but it seems Smolt is not the only project we will have in common in the future. It feels good to be proven right.

2 flames:

Anoniem zei

Nice to hear that Novell wants to pitch in. Definitely beats Shuttleworth's "let's sync our releases" :P Hopefully this will be the start of more things to come. Like teaming up for a feature for feature Exchange replacement :)

Yankee zei

Well, I would like to see our management tools merge a bit. This would give the user the power to deploy Red Hat, Fedora, and SuSE all with cobbler.