Hello! My name is Adrian and i’m a CS student at RIT who is minoring in Free and Open Source Software. I’ll be working as a Fedora Community Architect Intern during my time with Red Hat in Boston (US/Eastern TZ). I’m excited to learn about the Fedora community. One particular recurring interest of mine has been wondering how to encourage more of the people who benefit from open source to support it or give back in some way so that working on smaller, independent open source passion projects that others rely on can become as common as making a living working on corporate-controlled open source and improve the stability of the system as a whole (here’s an amazing podcast episode i recently heard about the recent XZ hack that makes a really good point about public goods at the end).
Maybe this is a bigger goal than I’ll realistically be able to tackle in the next few months in my current role, but I hope to at least learn as much as possible about Fedora and surrounding communities to see where there may be opportunities for me to make a difference.
If you need to reach me, I’ll do my best to monitor the following places:
Very ambitious what you have planned, but indeed a important point.
You might give us more details how you imagine this could work in a separate Discussion Topic . And also listen in which way community members would be interested/willing to help.
Economists study “free rider” and “tragedy of the commons” problems. I’ve written
papers on the impact of external factors driving changes in the structure of the fishing industry. Factors driving changes in the linux community:
work-from-home during COVID-19 lockdowns separated users from their institution’s support staff, who were fully occupied setting up remote access, so users
had to look elsewhere for support
many users come to linux from portable Android or Apple devices, so never used or needed a command-line until their Linux system had a problem
These created a need for support from online forums without the previous command-line experience needed to understand and use suggested ways to collect data and apply fixes.
From decades of experience with specialized open-source scientific applications, I find that new users often assume a problem they encounter is some mistake they made. Many “mistakes” are known pitfalls that lack mechanisms to help users avoid them (and can be called “attractive nuisance” issues from the legal concept used to describe unfenced swimming pools ). Too often, experienced users offer a quick fixes in user forums without explanation. New users need to be given pointers to relevant information, and encouraged to add details that will help others with the same issue discover the fix. Not everyone will be willing to invest time strengthening the community, but maintaining high standards in help forums will have a positive impact.
Many users view Linux as a platform for specific software that interests them. Many large software systems have their own user community and support forums. This can lead to issues where a linux distro packages large software systems (LSS) in a way that misses some functionality (e.g., when the distro version of some library is built without options that the LSS requires or needs a library that is unique to the LSS). My view is that Linux distros need to focus on core “platform” functions: file systems, networking, sound, graphics, and input device support, Many LSS’s provide some cross-distro installer. This helps to ensure that the LSS user community shares a common configuration. This in turn helps strengthen that LSS community as well as reducing the burden on distro packagers so they can focus on Linux as a robust platform.
Many people gain satisfaction from community participation, but there will always be bad actors disrupting communities by providing malicious “advice”, SPAM posts, personal attacks, etc. The sophistication and supporting (nation-state?) support for bad actors has been increasing and is a threat to the viability of many online forums.
I also wanted to note for anyone curious about Fedora internships, the Fedora Community Architect interns this year are using this GitLab issue tracker and milestones to plan tasks and projects for interns. If you are curious to follow along!
Welcome to the Fedora community.