Flock to Fedora¶
Details:¶
- Date: August 7-10, 2024
- Location: Rochester, New York, USA
- Sponsor: Gold Level
- Attended: Neil Hanlon (Infrastructure); Krista Burdine (Community)
Overview:¶
Flock to Fedora is an annual event hosted by Fedora for the purpose of team building and community development. The event includes annual reports on the State of Fedora and What Does Red Hat Want, workshops hosted by different SIGs and working groups within the Fedora project to prepare for the upcoming year, keynotes and speakers on Fedora related topics, and nightly community building activities.
Rocky Linux sponsors this event as part of our commitment to contribute upstream. As the ultimate enterprise Linux upstream, our support of Fedora can benefit the entire EL neighborhood which includes CentOS Stream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and any downstream projects of all three.
Highlights:¶
- From the Main Stage: We enjoyed hearing from Joseph Gayoso about Marketing Team Hopes & Dreams, including the plan and execution of growing the Fedora channel on Mastodon.
- Hackfests: Neil attended the Infra and Releng Hackfest. Krista attended the Fedora DEI Team Hackfest and participated in plans for the upcoming Week of Diversity event in March 2025.
- After Hours: Nighttime events always seem to provide the best memories. National Museum of Play: Each attendee was given tokens to play in the arcade. Connecting after hours in a place that celebrates play. Rocky Social: Krista and Neil connected with some Rocky fans; over a few beers we brainstormed expanding the Rocky footprint in new directions.
Outcome:¶
It’s no secret that the first few years of Rocky’s existence, creating space for a new community-driven EL in an established landscape, have included some fractious moments. The challenges made us dig into what fosters a community that can achieve the most good.
Our conclusion has been to lean into our place within the Enterprise Linux neighborhood of open source projects, and serve our community while being the best neighbor possible. We realized we need to be more transparent about our upstream support, through being contributors of the upstream projects, calling out issues and bug reports submitted from our project maintainers, and through straight-up financial support of events like Flock and the recurring CentOS Connect conference.
Flock to Fedora provides a neutral location to rub shoulders IRL with other members of the downstream EL community. When we interact in person it becomes easier to realize we are working toward a similar goal of providing a quality open source product that is supported by the community but suitable for enterprise use. Our various projects are not opponents to be pitted against one another, but co-laborers supporting the value of Enterprise Linux.
The Rocky Linux team leads appreciated the networking, support, and respect shared by the Fedora community. So long, Rochester. Until next time, fellow Fedorans.