This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 8 December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 21 December.

Interview with Jonathan Wright

  • Fedora User Account: Jonathan Wright
  • IRC/Nick: jonathanspw
  • Matrix Channels typically found in: #fedora, #fedora-devel, #epel, #epel-devel, #centos-devel, #almalinux, #centos-hyperscale
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

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

Over the past year and a half I’ve been drinking from a fire hose so to speak on all things Fedora and EPEL. I’ve been a user of the EL ecosystem for the better part of 20 years, and Fedora off and on throughout that. When I started packaging about a year and a half ago I never knew I would enjoy it so much, or working with open source in general. I feel that serving on FESCo is the next step for me in my open source contributions.

I’m on the team at AlmaLinux and can offer a unique perspective on things related to EL and EPEL.

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

I currently maintain (co-maintain and direct) over 600 packages and am a member of the EPEL SIG. My packages are of a wide variety and include many Python packages/modules. A few notable ones are certbot, btop, and iperf3, . The majority of my packages are CLI and server focused. I successfully built many of the Fedora infrastructure apps (noggin, ipsilon, some IPA components, etc.) for EPEL9.

I’m not officially in any of the marketing or ambassador SIG(s) but I’m a very vocal advocate for Fedora at many conferences I attend on behalf of AlmaLinux.

I became a packager sponsor a few months ago and while I don’t have any sponsees to my name yet, there are a few I’m working with.

While not directly related to FESCo I’ve also begun contributing to CentOS Stream and have successfully submitted changes which have been merged.

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

Disagreements are easily handled with good communication. When you’re on a team you are working towards the same goal with like-minded people and there’s no problem that good communication and discussion cannot overcome. Arguing for the sake of arguing has no place in a productive team.

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

I am relatively new to open source (incl. Fedora) contributions in general. I’ve been a consumer of open source and the EL/CentOS ecosystem for about 20 years and contributing back for about 2.

I’m the Infrastructure Team Lead for AlmaLinux and naturally have a very strong interest in EPEL. I daily drive Fedora on my workstations.

I also contribute to CentOS Stream. I’ve had patches merged into iperf3, postfix, sssd and more, along with some still open/pending.

I prefer KDE to Gnome 🙂

I’ve penned a few blog posts on relevant Fedora/EL things that may interest folks at https://jonathanspw.com