This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, 21 November and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 5 December 2019.

Interview with John M. Harris, Jr.

• Fedora account: johnmh
• IRC nick: johnmh (found in #fedora-commops, #fedora-games, #fedora-kde, #fedora-3dprinting, #fedora-security, #fedora-devel, #openblox)
• Fedora user wiki page

Questions

Why are you running for Council?

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 being told why we don’t have proprietary software (other than firmware) in the repositories to begin with. More and more, we often seem to be overlooking the first of the Four Foundations, Freedom.

Why should people vote for you?

I hope to represent the views of those who believe that Free Software is still important.

What do you want to accomplish as a member of the Fedora Council?

I want to work towards ensuring that Freedom is always considered when considering changes to Fedora, and that, when possible, Fedora is not used as a testing ground for projects like Modularity.