Jared Smith has been associated with the Fedora Project for several years and currently is the Project Leader. In an exclusive interview with devworx, he spoke on Fedora 16, the btrfs filesystem, other Linux projects and more! Jared said his role is all about bridging the gap between the Fedora user community, developers and Red Hat. To Red Hat as a company, he represents the Fedora community, while to the Fedora community, he represents Red Hat. That way, the bridges of communication always stay open in the community side as well as the corporate side.

Fedora primarily targets the lay user, while Red Hat focusses on the enterprise sector. Are these boundaries getting blurry now, with enterprise plugins and modules available for Fedora?

Well, in Fedora, our target audience is a tech savvy end user, a consumer who knows what Linux is, and is technical enough to be able to self support and find other users to help them if they have issues. We're not against trying out enterprise level stuff in Fedora because there are people who use Fedora in the enterprise, but that is not our primary focus. Our primary focus is more on the end user, beginning with collaborating, someone who would want to contribute and give back to the open source community.

So Fedora is an old player in the Linux space, and recently Ubuntu has emerged as a popular distro. How do you regard that and what is your response to that?

I guess the most important point is to set the perspective on it. I don't see Ubuntu as the enemy out there. Ubuntu really has the same goal as us out there, and that is use free software and make the world a better place. And so, Ubuntu, Fedora and many of the other distros out there are more like brothers and sisters rather than competitors. We can divide our own share of the pie, but quite honestly we're all interested in the rest of the pie than what we have as our share. I think it's very healthy to have different distributions, different preferences and different options. It gives people freedom! You know there is some healthy competition between Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and some other distros, but instead of it being as Fedora vs. Ubuntu vs. OpenSuse, it should be Fedora and the other distros vs. the rest of the world. That's how we view it. Quite honestly, competition does keep everyone on their toes. It makes them evolve and stay competitive. So it's a healthy thing.

More on Gnome and support cycles, on Page 2

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