The Fedora Project Board election is underway, with one seat open for election. I've held the seat for 18 months, and am standing for re-election. It's also great to see I've got some competition, all quality contributors whom I'm also pleased to count as friends.
For my involvement, I've focused on 3 areas:
- keep Fedora Free – Free and Open Source Software, Free of Cost, Free to Reuse, Free to Participate. I've remixed the Fedora packages into a Dell Firmware Update CD, and through that experience, uncovered ways we could make Fedora even easier to be remixed. The livecd-tools and revisor teams have, in my opinion, done outstanding work to bring this capability to everyone.
- Quality release. Fedora is long-known for its high quality, but as we've grown the number of packages in the collection from around 2000 in FC3, to over 5000 today, we've needed additional tools to help manage the complexity inherent in that growth. Since May 2006 I have regularly rebuilt the entire package set, posting build results. This helped to eliminate incorrect build dependencies, and helps to identify bitrot before it affects our users.
- Getting the bits out. It does no good if you have a great distribution, with great ethics, if people can't download and use it. Since October 2006 I have been the self-appointed Mirror Wrangler, stepping in to clean up our list of official mirrors, adding dozens of new official mirrors, and writing software to provide the fastest download experience for our users. Today we have over 110 official public mirrors worldwide, with more coming online every week. Our automatic mirror selection, either public or local private mirrors, is, IMHO, better than any other Linux distribution. Much of that thanks goes out to our dedicated mirror server admins who contribute their time, hardware, and bandwidth to Fedora.
Regardless of how this election goes, I'll continue to be involved in Fedora. I hope you'll consider including me in your list of approval votes.