I don’t think it needed to be open from the beginning if there were reasons not to have it open.
What was needed was that Fedora announces Fedora Hummingbird, at least in parallel with RedHat’s announcement. After all, Fedora was involved through the Council who can act on Fedora’s behalf. RedHat cannot.
What threw me (and probably others) off was that RedHat announced what Fedora was going to do. The info about Fedora’s involvement in Fedora Hummingbird came only after the big backlash, which is too late.
So, communication timing (and wording) was really unfortunate here.
Plus that devel-list post which must look strange in retrorespect.
In that context, I found it interesting to listen in on bits from the RedHat summit. It became crystal clear that “RHEL as platform for everything” (in particular AI; AI; have I mentioned AI?) and “zero CVE” (which can never be true, unless every CVE comes with a mitigation) are the two main buzz word thrusts for selling the platform, and that explains two of the current initiatives. (Hummingbird looks cobbled together in dire need for something covering the “zero CVE” buzz, IMHO.)
There’s a third one that’s being emphasized, though: sovereignty. No, not Fedora’s sovereignty … but hearing Nvidia talk about the importance of open source for sovereignty over the platform was interesting, too.