This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with John M. Harris, Jr. (JohnMH)

• Fedora Account: JohnMH
  
• IRC: JohnMH (found in #fedora-commops, #fedora-games, #fedora-kde, #fedora-3dprinting, #fedora-security, #fedora-devel, #openblox)
  
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

What’s your background in Fedora? What expertise do you bring based on past experience, and what projects are you actively involved in now?

I have been involved in Fedora since late 2015, actively since 2016. I’m currently involved in the CommOps project, 3D Printing SIG and Games SIG. Additionally, I am working on a Fedora Remix called Millennium (a libre Fedora Remix).

Previously, I have written articles for Fedora Magazine, some of which were fairly popular, such as “Container technologies in Fedora: systemd-nspawn”, which had over five thousand views as of September 4, 2016.

Unfortunately, for a short time while starting my business, I was not able to contribute as actively to Fedora as I would like to have. As of February of 2018, I am back and looking to get more involved.

What do you plan to accomplish on the Council? What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today? What should we do about them?

I believe that we’ve been rushing to make change where there is no call
for it recently. We may be inadvertently ostracizing users and
developers by moving from conventional tools, and moving away from our
Four Foundations: Freedom, Friends, Features and First.

For example, recently users were provided with easy ways to install
proprietary software on Fedora (nvidia proprietary drivers, google
chrome browser), without even being told why we don’t have proprietary
software (other than firmware) in the repositories to begin with. More
and more, we seem to be ignoring the first of the Four Foundations,
Freedom.

What are your interests and accomplishments outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?

I’ve been involved in Free (Libre) and Open Source software since 2014. In late 2017, I started a business with the sole purpose of developing and supporting Free Software. Outside of that, I am a contributor to several FLOSS projects, and I am the maintainer of the OpenBlox project, a FLOSS game engine.

Outside of Fedora, I actively contribute to projects such as Libreboot and OpenBlox. I am a card-carrying member of the Free Software Foundation, and a strong proponent of both the “Free Software” and “Right to Repair” movements.