Matt "msw" Wilson
@mattdm @bconoboy @doctormo @vathpela @funnelfiasco I feel like we emphasized the latter part to a very high degree to convince our executives to let us do the Red Hat Linux Project, as they were concerned about RHEL cannibalization.
This is part of the reason we had to re-brand the Red Hat Linux Project as "Fedora".
Matt "msw" Wilson
@mattdm @bconoboy @doctormo @vathpela @funnelfiasco In the arguing for Fedora to exist (and the Red Hat Linux project before it), "project vs. product" was in part highlighting how the a "project" is an ongoing process to produce work-product ("this is my passion project"), and in part positioning the work-product as unqualified for use in production settings ("you would never rely on something that is a project for your business, you need a commercially supported product.").
Matthew Miller
I think _that's_ the RH jargon. _Fedora_ is a project*, and Server, Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, CoreOS, Silverblue, Cloud are valuable things the project produces and shares.
* or, as @funnelfiasco says, really a _program_
Brendan Conoboy
@doctormo @vathpela @mattdm I tend to think of project as the valuable thing that is shared and product to be the valuable thing that is sold.
Abandoned
Frightfully silly indeed. Project constituents are people with vibrant and, yes at times organic motivations, directions, "gestalting infrastructure"
Product, hmmm, that's a land mine of a definition. Sometimes it means binaries, sometimes it means item for sale. Or service for sale.
I.e programming inkscape is my product which produces the product inkscape which is produced by the project inkscape as a public good production. :ablobcateyesflip:
Brendan Conoboy
Brendan Conoboy
@mattdm @vathpela I find the distinction uncomfortable myself, but that may be solely due to the fact that the differentiator is the same stuff we don't know how to do with community yet.
Farce Majeure
@bconoboy @mattdm I mostly just think "project" is a bit dismissive for long term upstream work, and I've seen various PMs use that to argue (thankfully without much success) that we should invest less in that work.
Matthew Miller
Yessss. I was debating which order to use and apparently went with "both and neither at once". I will use the magical Mastodon "edit post" feature.
Farce Majeure
Matthew Miller
Aside — I'm not at all keen on Red Hat's "project vs. product" jargon. But that is indeed a whole 'nuther discussion.
Brendan Conoboy
It was in this spirit that #Linux distributions took off and the struggle to keep doing this fun hobby in a way that paid for itself became commonplace. Working at #RedHat, who was making ends meet with CD sales, coffee mugs, and the occasional support contract kept those good times going. When #proprietary #unix, by way of SCO, started getting lawsuit crazy, we found the #GPL really did stand up in court. #Groklaw was born, and IP law became something we all learned thanks to PJ, Webbink, etc.
Brendan Conoboy
Many don't realize it, RH did early on: If you work upstream first your development is vastly more sustainable. It sets a higher bar to make change, but it pays off in the end. This is in keeping with the core value proposition of all these software licenses, what made them different from shareware: the once radical idea that it is the #sourcecode, not the binaries that are the bedrock. We later learned that this is the difference between a project and a product, but that's jumping ahead.
Brendan Conoboy
One of the things that really got a hook in me was the idea that software would be used for tyranny, that the people in charge of the software would then be in charge of me. An old friend, 6, quipped that in the future you would need a license to own a compiler. Free software concepts were thus incredibly appealing. I remember when the US government flirted with regulating cryptography domestically. People on Usenet sold "This shirt is a munition" Ts with #RSA code printed. Clipper was a joke.
Brendan Conoboy
Way back before Free Software, then Open Source were the phenomenon they have become, it was a very different world. Public domain, shareware, home brew computing... software licensing was alien to hobbyests. We relied on vague ownership concepts that didn't even have standing in international law. The #gpl, #free software, later #oss, this was all part of growing up, the result of many iterations of an attempt to control in some ways while sharing in others.
Brendan Conoboy
In tech years, I'm pretty old. I started using Linux when it was easiest to get as a boot image and root image on the Banjo FTP server, maybe ftp.funet.fi. Later, SLS, then Slackware, then FreeBSD, OpenBSD (co-wrote the IP Filter howto)... then #RedHat bought my company. I've subsequently spent more than half my life working at RH, and most of that time running Fedora, since Fedora was a thing. This is not impressive, I've just been here, and that means I have some perspective on #opensource.
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