This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.

Interview with Dave Cantrell

  • FAS ID: dcantrell
  • Matrix Rooms: Looking right now it appears Fedora Council, FRCL, Introductions, Announcements, Fedora Meeting, and Fedora Meeting 1. I tend to go to rooms that people ask me to join. I also use it a lot for DMs and people find me that way. For me primarily I rely on Matrix for our online meetings and DMs with people. Email continues to be the most reliable way to reach me and have a conversation.

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

I have been a member of FESCo for a while now and enjoy doing it. Fedora is really good at bringing in new technologies and ensuring that we minimize disruption for users. I enjoy the technical discussions and working together to ensure that changes account for everything before we bring them in. Making and having a plan is often difficult and requires a lot of coordination.

I am also interested in mentoring people interested in running for FESCo and introducing some changes to how we staff FESCo. There are discussions going on right now for that, but an important thing for me is ensuring we have a succession plan for FESCo that keeps Fedora going without burning people out. If you are interested in being on FESCo, please reach out to me!

Lastly, I feel very strongly about open source software and the licenses we have around it. I believe that it has fundamentally changed our industry and made it a better place. We continue to see changes come in to Fedora that bring challenges to those ideas and I want to ensure that Fedora’s position around open source, creator rights, and licensing are not lost or eroded.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

My job at Red Hat is working on the Software Management team. The two big projects on that team are dnf and rpm. But we also have a lot of dnf and rpm adjacent software. I am upstream for or contribute to numerous other projects. I also maintain a variety of packages in Fedora and EPEL as well as RHEL (and by extension CentOS Stream).

I am a sponsor for new contributors and I help mentor new developers in both the community and at Red Hat (that is, developers at Red Hat wanting to participate more in Fedora).

I am a member of the Fedora Council where I focus on engineering issues when we discuss large topics and strategy.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

Communication has always been a challenge in our industry and community. We have language differences, cultural differences, and communication medium differences. One thing I notice a lot is that some discussions lead to people taking things personally. Often the root cause of that is people feeling like they are not being heard. A solution I have found is to suggest changing the communication medium. I am perfectly fine communicating over email, or chat, or other online methods. But talking in person can go a long way. We know the value of having in-person events and a lot of people find that their interactions with people in the community improve simply because they finally met someone in person at an event. While that is not always possible, we do have video conference capabilities these days. I do use that in Fedora and it helps quite a bit.

For everyone, if you find yourself in a frustrating situation, I recommend first stepping away and collecting your thoughts. Then remind yourself why everyone is involved in the first place. We all want to achieve the same things, so let’s try to work towards that and find common ground. And if necessary, suggest an alternate communication mechanism.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

Most people are surprised to learn that I support protons more than electrons. I like being positive in everything I pursue. It’s ok for us to disagree. It’s ok to have a position, learn something new, and then change that position. The important thing to me is that Fedora ultimately remains a fun project.

My favorite color is orange. I use an Android mobile phone. I do not use current Apple hardware, but I am a big fan of the Apple II series and 68k Macintosh series. If you corner me, I will likely talk your ear off about the Apple IIgs or any Macintosh Quadra (particularly the various crazy and horrible operating systems Apple made for the platform).