Hey folks! I am dropping in on behalf of @jspaleta and the Fedora Council.
So, there was a lot of work behind the scenes that pre-empted this announcement. We knew people would have a lot of questions and feedback once this came. For the technical questions, I’ll let @fatherlinux and the folks driving the work weigh in on those. However, in my reply, I will do my best to walk through how we got here and a little hint of where this work could go next.
However, the thing that I want to top-post is that I ask for everyone’s patience on this. Just like any open source project, not all of the details are figured out yet. And that’s okay! Perhaps most importantly, no new work is being forced into anyone’s workflows. This announcement is not going to generate new, unplanned work for packagers and the Fedora development community. If there are major changes, then you could likely expect to see smaller bits work their way through the Fedora Changes process.
However, this new thing is happening in Fedora. As someone who spent seven years as a volunteer before I made it to Red Hat, I know people have questions, concerns, and doubts. (I also saw the saga of Modularity unfold, as many of y’all also did.)
What feels special to me here is a real, demonstrated commitment that I have seen to doing this work in an open, public way, aligned with the Fedora Foundations and our unique culture. And I’m not just saying that. I really mean it. When @fatherlinux first came to the Fedora Council, I think he was actually about to throw in the towel because we had so many demands and feedback from the original form! We put him and the Hummingbird team to task on making real commitments to the Open Source Way and Fedora. And they listened and addressed our feedback.
So, give us your feedback, but don’t assume the worst here. We want to partner with the community to build something new and exciting. There is still a lot of room to define the future, and we are going to
Now, let me try and answer to the specific comments and questions that I can below. 
First off, this is something brand new that I was not expecting. You’re right that it is going to drive a lot more attention and discussion here. To be honest, I was not prepared for that, but here we go! We are really doing our best! 
Congratulations, y’all found the first bug! 
This was totally accidental and obviously not a good luck. No account or logins are needed, especially a Red Hat account. If it needed a Red Hat account, it would be called Red Hat Hummingbird. 
It is permitted, and the Fedora Council did approve it. @fatherlinux in particular has been engaging with us for months, trying to understand how to do this right, how to build this in the community-first way, and where to plan future resources for the right things.
I’ll comment more about the specific trademark process the Council followed in below comments.
Fair. I don’t think we are asking anyone to jump in today and start adopting anything. Trust has to be earned, and it is earned through demonstrated commitment.
So, I respect what you are saying here. However, I hope that you will remain an observer, like me, to the demonstrated commitment that will come around this work. And ultimately, if you don’t like it in the end, that’s fine! Nobody is being forced into using it or adopting their workflows.
It is a new, experimental idea, but also with real resource allocations behind it.
Agreed! Bug fixed. 
Well, hello there! 
Here you are. Let’s discuss! 
Could you explain which part of this announcement makes you feel this way? I genuinely do not feel this is the case, but I would like to better understand why you feel this way. Maybe @fatherlinux and the team could adapt things to address concerns.
I know the team wants feedback and to do this in the Open Source Way. There is room not just to consume and use, but also to participate. This is just unfolding, so expect that more contribution pathways will emerge on this too, outside of mere feedback.
Even before my time at Red Hat, Fedora folks have brought things from Red Hat Summit to Fedora. After all, RHEL and many other Enterprise Linux distros (Amazon Linux, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and many more) are a major part of our ecosystem. I don’t think it is necessarily surprising that things that happen downstream float their back upstream.
Certainly for me, when I became involved eleven years ago as a volunteer, this relationship felt pretty clear to me. And I was okay with it!
Indeed. I think the Sandbox stuff is still in the oven and needs to get baked more. It is an important discussion, but the Sandbox is not ready for primetime in Fedora yet. I think we will get there. We need a better framework for experiments in Fedora, and a pathway to either succeed and grow, or to gracefully fail and shut down.
This is the outset of it! As I said at the top, I encourage folks to approach this with cautious skepticism. The team really wants to show up and do the work. The real work. It is impossible to expect perfection, and I think we need to leave room for things like this to emerge and prove themselves.
Let’s leave room for the Hummingbird team to build up and do the work. There are no special exceptions being made here, no unwritten policies being enforced, and no fast-track bypass of community governance.
The only thing that happened without much public transparency was the trademark request. I understand why folks would feel upset that this was not public. However…
As Matthew said, sometimes there is this tension. Our trademark policy does not say there has to be a public ticket; it only says there needs to be Fedora Council approval. The Council did review and discuss this. Perhaps aggressively so, it could be said. Now, normally we do use tickets for this, but this whole issue with no private issues on Forgejo yet (as we had in Pagure and even Trac before that) was the perfect storm for why this might feel weird for many of you.
Indeed, if we had private tickets, I would have pushed @fatherlinux to do that at the outset, so we could have flipped a switch from private to public. That said, I think we should have a public ticket for documentation and tracking purposes. Expect to see this soon.
Honestly, I think this long list does demonstrate that we need a better way for experiments to happen in Fedora. What happens when anyone, not just Red Hat, wants to take a big bet on technology? (Btrfs is a famous example of a not-Red-Hat technology bet—it does happen![1]) We need a framework for new ideas and experiments.
ONLY the trademark. No other special exceptions. If there are changes, expect to see either System-Wide Changes or Self-Contained Changes.
I know this part feels bad. I also know if I were not at Red Hat, it might have felt fishy for me too. But since I have an insider perspective and I have gotten to know @fatherlinux better, let’s say that today is where we change the narrative. No more secrets and no avoiding community feedback.
The doors are open for feedback, and not only! I really do believe that the participatory part of this is genuine and real. But we need to let @fatherlinux and the Hummingbird team show up and earn your trust. I fully expect that you, and others, do not have that trust yet. Let’s see if we can change your mind!
There is a lot to figure out still. You’re right! My hope is that there is enough of something figured out for people to sink their teeth into, but not enough to call it a finished and done thing.
If Fedora Hummingbird is actually going to be a successful thing, then the community will have to come along. I really like to believe that we suffered enough trauma and PTSD from Modularity to not make many of the same mistakes.
OK, so I think I can answer this as someone who actually served on the Fedora Council years before I worked at Red Hat. We also have had private tickets for a long time, not only after the IBM-Red Hat acquisition. Most of the private tickets we have had in my tenure in Fedora were actually Code of Conduct issues. Before 2020-2021, the Fedora Council was effectively the Code of Conduct Committee. So, whenever those issues came up, it went to the Council.
For various reasons, I believe it is unethical to make private issues from the past like this into public ones today. However, if someone is elected to the Fedora Council, then they will be able to see the private Forgejo repo where we migrated our private issues from Pagure.[2]
Obviously, this is not a Code of Conduct issue. We have a few cases of things where we had private tickets which were later made public. See the provenpackager incident from a while back and the current ticket we have about a Conflict of Interest Policy. On Pagure, this was opened as a private issue but we chose to make it public.
Hmmm. I agree and disagree simultaneously! Per the F21 decision to create Editions, we realized that some sort of purpose is needed to differentiate Fedora’s offerings from the crowd. If Fedora wasn’t for anything, then people would use Ubuntu or Arch Linux instead without ever thinking about Fedora.
However, I think this responsibility is up to Editions, and even individual SIGs and Working Groups, to explain the purpose and objectives of what makes something we are doing different and worthwhile. Otherwise, it just disappears into the fog of confusion and uncertainty.
Yes, I hand-typed my em-dash with my Compose key, I did not use ANY AI at all to draft this reply, but I am not going to give up my em-dashes just because AI stole them from me. I was using them first!!! ↩︎
I don’t think this is a good reason to solely run for election on Fedora Council! But the point I am trying to make here is that if we had things we didn’t want anyone to see, then it would be behind a Red Hat firewall and be super locked down. That is simply not the case here. ↩︎