This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. The voting period starts on Thursday, 28 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 11 June.

Interview with Michal Novotný

  • Fedora account: clime
  • IRC nick: clime (found in #fedora-admin, #git, #c++, #bash, #fedora-apps, #libravatar)
  • Fedora user wiki page

Questions

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

I think there are some things in Fedora that could be done in more beneficial manner both in human and technical sense. I am a long-term dedicated Fedora user, used to work for Red Hat and nowadays still continuing as a Fedora contributor. With my background, I am quite well acquainted with some of the issues Fedora has and I would like to help solving them. I am aware it’s a long term battle that is worth going for.

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

I am a dist-git package co-maintainer (both upstream and downstream) and I am developing tools to improve and modernize packaging experience. I also maintain libravatar service which is providing avatars on services like pagure.io or src.fedoraproject.org.

How should we handle cases where Fedora’s and Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s needs conflict in an incompatible way?

I think there is always some middle ground that needs to be searched for. I think it’s important for people to listen to feedback and try to incorporate it into their ideas of how things should look like. I believe any incompatibility can be resolved by communication with the other side. Because of the symbiotic nature of Fedora and Red Hat, there isn’t really a thing that would be bad for one and good for another. It’s either bad for both or good for both. Therefore, it’s important to resolve those incompatibilities as their resolution will benefit both parties. But in the end, it mainly depends on each and every individual to be open to the ideas of others. Those that are seated in various committees or are generally well-known in the community should go by example.

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

I am a programmer by heart with sysadmin, programming-for-hardware and lots of other experience. Therefore, I think I can provide lots of relevant technical feedback.

At the same time, I like Fedora and I know how friendly the community is so while giving the feedback I will always try to do it in this particular Fedora spirit.