Originally published at: F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Neal Gompa (ngompa) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 44 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts Monday, June 1st and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Friday, June 12th 2026.
Interview with Neal Gompa (ngompa)
- FAS ID: ngompa (
Conan Kudois a common nickname for me) - Matrix Rooms: devel:fedoraproject.org, #asahi:fedoraproject.org, #asahi-devel:fedoraproject.org, #kde:fedoraproject.org, #workstation:fedoraproject.org, #cloud:fedoraproject.org, #kernel:fedoraproject.org #centos-hyperscale:fedoraproject.org, #budgie:fedoraproject.org, #multimedia:fedoraproject.org, #miracle:fedoraproject.org, #cosmic:fedoraproject.org, #centos-kernel:fedora.im, #admin:opensuse.org, #chat:opensuse.org, #bar:opensuse.org, #obs:opensuse.org, #RedHat:matrix.org, #networkmanager:matrix.org, #rpm:matrix.org, #rpm-ecosystem:matrix.org, #yum:matrix.org, #manatools:matrix.org, #lugaru:matrix.org, #buddiesofbudgie-dev:matrix.org, #PackageKit:matrix.org, #mir-server:matrix.org, #mageia-dev:matrix.org, #kiwi:matrix.org (There’s quite a bit more, but I think that sort of covers it. 😉) (There’s quite a bit more, but I think that sort of covers it. 😉)
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
As a long-time member of the Fedora community as a user and a contributor, I have benefited from the excellent work of many FESCo members before me to ensure Fedora continues to evolve as an amazing platform for innovation. For the past few years, I have had the wonderful privilege of serving as a member of FESCo, and I enjoyed my time serving to steer Fedora into the future, and I wish to continue to contribute my expertise to help analyze and make good decisions on evolving the Fedora platform.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
The bulk of my contributions to Fedora lately are on the desktop side of things, though I have gotten back into doing core stack stuff too. Most recently, I’ve worked within the KDE community to help develop Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup to further modernize the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition and enable it to fully participate in the Fedora Ready program. I have also been actively assisting our friends at various PC makers participating in the Fedora Ready program to better support Fedora as an operating system offering for their products. This has directly led to the Fedora community gaining a new Fedora Ready participant with Star Labs, who offers Fedora KDE on their products as an operating system option. There’s always more to come on that front, and I hope Fedora Ready will continue to grow. On the core stack side of things, I’ve recently ported PackageKit’s DNF backend to DNF5, which once again unifies Fedora’s package management stack for the first time in several releases. This unlocks the ability for us to freely leverage DNF5 features that do not have analogues in DNF4.
My hope is that the work I do helps with making the experience using and contributing to Fedora better than it was ever before and that Fedora’s technical leadership in open source draws in more users and contributors.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
I attempt to explain my viewpoint and try to build consensus through persuasion and collaboration. If there isn’t a path to consensus as-is, I try to identify the points of disagreement and see if there is a way to compromise to resolve the disagreement. Generally, this ultimately results in a decision that FESCo can act on.
Where do you think the Fedora Project should position itself concerning the use of ‘AI’ in software development?
I am rather conflicted about “AI” technology, especially LLM-based generative AI (GenAI) technology. I worry that it wipes out the implicit fairness that we believe Free Software carries. The nature of this tooling and how people gain access to quality tools creates an unpleasant classist split of haves and have-nots based on affordability. As the costs to access and leverage LLM technology skyrocket, a new underlying elitism will implicitly develop since only gainfully employed affluent developers will have access to the best technology.
It is true that there are open models under OSI licenses that exist (IBM Granite and Google Gemma 4 are examples of these), and I know that it’s possible to create your own models leveraging open source technology. But to date, open models do not yet produce results as good as the frontier proprietary cloud models, and we now operate in a world where proprietary services tightly integrate these things together and make it very hard to ignore the result. Perhaps more focused development on open models leveraging open source technologies will change that, but given how expensive such endeavors are, I am a little skeptical. Or perhaps the lack of willingness by many AI practitioners to pursue that is what makes me skeptical.
Putting that all aside, I am skeptical of AI technology in large part of my experience as an open source software maintainer. The quality of contributions are significantly lower than unassisted ones thus far (here’s a notable example), and while I’m sure it is possible to leverage it effectively in a productive fashion, there is mounting evidence that our ability to learn and maintain cognitive skills are weakened by reliance on AI technology as it exists today. I would prefer to receive poorer contributions from people that were their own as an opportunity to help them grow, because that is the embodiment of human success.
In the end, I do not feel like it is a good idea for Fedora as a project to make AI a critical pillar, but supporting open source, well-integrated tooling for people to experiment with AI/ML in the environment of their choice and knowing the risks they take on in doing so is perfectly fine with me.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
To me, the most important thing about Fedora is that we’re a community with a bias for innovation. Our community looks to solve problems and make solutions available as FOSS, and this is something that Fedora uniquely does when many others take the easy path to ship old software or nonfree software everywhere. We work with tens of thousands of projects to deliver an amazing platform in an easily accessible and open fashion, built on FOSS infrastructure and tools. This makes Fedora special to me, and we should continue to hold ourselves to that high standard.
I’m also a big believer in community bonds and collaboration, which is why people tend to find me all over the place. I’m involved in Asahi Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, and several other similar projects in leadership roles as well as a contributor in order to demonstrate my commitment to this philosophy.