This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Wednesday, January 17th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, January 24th, 2018.

Interview with Josh Boyer (jwboyer)

• Fedora Account: jwboyer
• IRC: jwboyer/jwb #fedora-devel, #fedora-kernel, #fedora-council, #fedora-admin
• Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

I continue to think that the rapid adoption of containers in the tech world is increasingly important. The work the Fedora community has put into FLIBS and other container efforts has been very valuable in pushing Fedora into that space. Combined with the Fedora Atomic work to provide a small and stable OS install that is easily consumed for running containers, I think Fedora is well positioned to continue in that space. I would like to see us improve on this work and expand both the offerings to meet more users needs.

However, containers are not and likely will never be the solution for ALL users. I have found the on-going Modularity work to be extremely interesting to help round out some of the gaps that containers don’t fill for whatever reason. Being able to build software decoupled from the underlying OS and offer multiple versions simultaneously expands the potential user base beyond what it is today. It would be interesting to see how far we can go with this concept.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

As mentioned above, I think Modularity is one. Outside of that specific technology, I would like to see us focus on the general concept of producing an OS and community that is able to handle different release cadences for various Editions. This will be difficult and require a lot of collaboration, but that is where the fun is had.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I think we still struggle with cross-team collaboration and communication in many areas. We continue to improve on it, but I think FESCo can help specifically by more actively working with Marketing, Docs, QA, and websites. Perhaps my perception is wrong, but I still feel like we tend to stay too specific on the technical issues and assume others can determine what is relevant for end users from our devel list and meeting logs. Working with those teams to highlight changes, etc would benefit the entire distro and our end users.

On a similar token, I would like to see some increased focus on what purpose our Spins serve, how much usage they’re getting, and how the spin maintainers view the consumption of the OS bits we’re producing.