Originally published at: FESCo Elections: Interview with Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh) – Fedora Community Blog
This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Tuesday 20th May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, 2 June 2025.
Interview with Stephen Gallagher
- FAS ID: sgallagh
- Matrix Rooms: Fedora Devel, Fedora ELN, Release Engineering, Fedora Infrastructure
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I’ve been a member of FESCo for many years now, and it’s been a great experience. It gives me the opportunity to see a much wider view of the project than just the pieces I would otherwise contribute to.
As for steering the direction of Fedora, I think I would mostly just continue to do as I have been doing: pushing for Fedora to continue to be both the most advanced and one of the most stable open-source distributions in the world.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
Aside from my work on FESCo, I am a contributor to and former Lead on the Fedora ELN project, which is a prototype of what will eventually be the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Performing these activities in the public provides both an opportunity for the community to be involved with the creation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as painting a clear picture of Fedora’s value to Red Hat, our primary sponsor.
Most recently, I’ve joined the Log Detective team and I’m working to enable AI-powered build analysis to help packagers and maintainers quickly identify issues in their packages.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
First and foremost, I always strive for consensus. Most disagreements are not fundamental differences between people. Instead, they tend to be more nuanced. My goal (particularly within my FESCo service) is to make sure that everyone’s opinion is heard and considered; I then try to figure out how to meet in the middle.
Of course, not every decision can be resolved with consensus. In the event that a true impasse is reached, that’s the point where I usually advocate for calling a vote and proceeding with the majority opinion. On the whole, I believe that democratic decision-making is the best solution that humanity has come up with for resolving otherwise-insoluble disagreements.
What else should community members know about you or your position
Just so it’s very clear, I’m a Red Hat employee. My day-job at Red Hat is to organize and improve the processes we use to kick off development of the next major RHEL release. As such, my stances on FESCo will often represent my opinion of what will make that effort operate more smoothly. So, no matter how entertaining it might be, we’re not going to be replacing the entire contents of /usr/share/icons with the Beefy Miracle icon.
Since it’s the topic on everyone’s lips these days, I’ll talk a little bit about my stance on Generative AI (aka GenAI). It’s a complicated topic and one that I think carries a lot of potential risks (and rewards!!) for open-source. I’ll start with the most important statement: my opinion of GenAI and that of my employer disagree at times. I will strive to represent what I believe are the best interests of the Fedora Project in this space and will not serve as a simple mouthpiece for my employer. That said, my stance on the topic is fairly nuanced: I have reservations about the way that data-sets are assembled and with how copyright (and copyleft) are respected in their usage. I have a strong moral opposition to attempts to replace human ingenuity and artistry with empty machine-generated forgeries. I am particularly concerned about the environmental impact of AI datacenters.
Where I believe that AI can shine, however, is when it supplements human capabilities. I believe that AI can be a useful tool to simplify repetitive tasks and to help process enormous batches of data to help isolate the pieces that humans should investigate. If I was to boil my stance down to a single statement it would be this: AI should never be responsible for making a decision; AI should be there to aid humans in making them.