Summary: It certainly does seem like Red Hat's (or IBM's) policies put off Fedora contributors; many packages are becoming orphaned and some are critical dependencies for larger applications

Assessing numerical data can help us determine whether anecdotal "gossip" is based on facts or a false gut feeling. So we've looked into a mirror of fedora-devel and went backwards in time, comparing the latest page to prior page, 2 pages ago, 3 pages ago, and 4 pages ago. Here's one way to assess the situation.

Threads with "orphaned" in the title (subject line):

Going backwards in time, never before did the orphaning seem so frequent.

page 1 (latest): 9 page 2: 2 page 3: 0 page 4: 3 page 5: 1

Threads with "orphan" in the title (subject line:

page 1 (latest): 17 page 2: 5 page 3: 3 page 4: 8 page 5: 5

Fedora 39 release will have a really hard time:

Beta freeze is days away and over 200 packages are orphaned. Some are critical.

If the rumour is true and IBM will give Red Hat its fourth CEO in less than four years (!), then it's too late already. The company is being mismanaged and Jim Whitehurst left IBM abruptly without explanation.

Red Hat's Ben Cotton used to keep track of these sorts of numbers in his annual and weekly reports ("Friday's Fedora Facts"), but Red Hat sacked him some months ago. His latest report was in the middle of May. The number of orphaned packages has grown a lot since then. ⬆