Bonum Certa Men Certa

Fedora Seems to be Dying of Neglect by IBM

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 06, 2025,
updated Jan 06, 2025

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PLANET FEDORA (or "Fedora Planet") used to be very active, but this year it's even more quiet than last year, e.g. only 4 new entries from 3 people in the past 5 days (screenshot below). We're not even particularly picky; it's like this almost every week, sometimes it's even less active than this. In the days of Max Spevack (Fedora Project Leader Feb 2006 - Feb 2008) the "planet" had a lot more going on than one could keep track of in a few minutes per day. Even in 2018 (before IBM) many people were still involved in Fedora - not just Red Hat staff - so there was frequent activity. Many of those people have "moved on" and IBM did not "replace" or attract people to fill the gap. There was no outreach and IBM stank of hostility.

fedoraplanet

The above is very "tumbleweed"-like. When I used the first (and second) releases of Fedora (FC and FC2) there was a massive community of volunteers. They wanted GNU/Linux to succeed on the desktop (laptop too) - an objective hardly shared even by Red Hat back then. It was left for volunteers to pursue, for the most part....

Another case of neglect and divestment is the "diversity" (or DEI) room of Fedora. It has been practically dead since December 1, as nobody talks, even when someone asks a question:

the 'diversity' (or DEI) room of Fedora

Had somebody responded (nope!), it would at least seem like there's still a point talking there.

For a number of years IBM has let Fedora rot, with a lack of investment and care, not to mention elections almost nobody knows about or participates in. It has gotten so bad that in order to get elected one just needs to run and be eligible. There's no real race. To "win" an election one would only need to send an E-mail expressing an interest.

IBM is doing to Fedora what it did to CentOS. It's still there, but only/mostly by name. Many people who were involved in CentOS left after the calamity of summer 2023. Does IBM even care? It's too busy serving Microsoft as a reseller of proprietary software and surveillance. To IBM, CentOS and Fedora aren't "cash", so they've got to go without IBM explicitly saying so (as that would anger many people and tarnish the respective brands).

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