This is a part of the Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 3 June and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 16 June.

Interview with Stephen Gallagher

Questions

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

I’ve been a member of FESCo for many years now, and it’s been a great experience. It gives me the opportunity to see a much wider view of the project than just the pieces I would otherwise contribute to.

As for steering the direction of Fedora, I think I would mostly just continue to do as I have been doing: pushing for Fedora to continue to be both the most advanced and one of the most stable open-source distributions in the world.

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

Aside from my work on FESCo, I am also acting as the Lead on the Fedora ELN project, which is a prototype of what will eventually be the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Assuming this project works as planned (and so far, we’ve used it to great effect in shipping RHEL 9 right on time), it provides a clear picture of Fedora’s value to Red Hat, our primary sponsor. When Red Hat is happy, Fedora gets more support and funding. This is good for everyone in the community.

With the advent of CentOS Stream, where do you think Fedora stands now and what should be the plans for the future?

Initially, I was a bit concerned about the impact that CentOS Stream would have on Fedora’s traditional position as “RHEL’s upstream”. As the plans developed further, I came to see that they both can have their own valuable niche’s. Fedora’s place, as ever, is at the front of the race. Fedora is both a development platform for the next major (X) release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it’s also an incredibly powerful general-use desktop and developer workstation available for all to use.

CentOS Stream’s position in this new world is to be the public’s way to take what they’ve learned from years of working with Fedora and start making direct contributions to the next minor release (Y) of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As such, I think that CentOS Stream and Fedora complement each other nicely and I am no longer concerned about Fedora losing relevance to CentOS Stream.

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

Just so it’s very clear, I’m a Red Hat employee. My day-job at Red Hat is to organize and improve the processes we use to kick off development of the next major RHEL release. As such, my stances on FESCo will often represent my opinion of what will make that effort operate more smoothly. So, no matter how entertaining it might be, we’re not going to be replacing the entire contents of /usr/share/icons with the Beefy Miracle icon .