Originally published at: F44 FESCo Elections: Interview with Simon de Vlieger (supakeen) – 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 Simon de Vlieger (supakeen)
- FAS ID: supakeen
- Matrix Rooms: I am in many rooms but most active in the Release Engineering, ELN, bootc, Atomic Desktops, and my projects Image Builder channel.
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
In the past I’ve interacted with FESCo only through change proposals. Due to the nature of my work onimage-builder I’ve gathered quite a bit of knowledge and ideas (though never enough) about the whole of Fedora and how it is put together. I’d like to take part in the other side of things both to learn
more but also to apply what I have learned.
Personally I’m a big proponent of “building on Fedora”. By that I mean that we could and maybe should
make Fedora as generic as possible in the packaging department with few assumptions about how an eventual system is laid out. This would open the road for more technical variety in the various editions, spins, and
labs. Examples here (non-exhaustive) would be UKIs, systemd-boot, BTRFS boot-to-snapshot, and others.
Separately but interconnected is that I’d love it for Fedora to be the prime place people go to if they want
to build their own flavour of a distribution. Remix culture should be nurtured, documented, and made as easy as possible so that the ideas can be tried and tested outside of Fedora before making their way into Fedora.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
Well, I take a super pragmatic approach to disagreements. Sometimes it’s just easier to bow out of a disagreement
than to continue it. Often times one person cares more about a given problem than another person and to me that
means it can be good to give in, expecting the same in return on a later issue that another person might care more
about.
This way fosters pretty strong ownership of problems and an environment where people trust eachother on problems
rather than going at eachother.
Where do you think the Fedora Project should position itself concerning the use of ‘AI’ in software development?
Super hard question. Since this is specifically about AI in software development most of it would probably concern what upstreams do. As long as they keep compatible licenses we won’t have much of a say in this.
As for the more general approach to ‘AI’ in software development I feel like we should promote open implementations as far as that’s possible. The AI/ML SIG has been doing a lot of work with ROCm and other open stacks to be able to run models on Fedora. The future is not servitude to big tech companies but hopefully running our own local models.
There’s probably more that can be done in outreach as ‘AI’ stacks can be notoriously hard to package, our expertise could be shared and it might be useful; but I don’t know if that should/would be a Fedora Project kind of thing.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
Firstly, I want to disclose that I work at Red Hat as people do hold opinions about that so let’s have that out of the
way.
Other than that I want things to be open with the community deciding our direction. Generally I’m on the ‘conservative’
side as far as there is a conservative side in Fedora. I mean that in the sense that I think our current rules and guidelines concerning contribution and packaging are a decent starting point and we should not change them lightly.
We should also try to use as much as possible that what Fedora already offers. Many recent projects have been causing splits in infrastructure and community spirit. Let’s do less of that.