ISV Special Interest Group

Welcome. This is the independent software vendors (ISV) special interest group (SIG).

If you are consiering packaging your ISV software for Fedora, read Fedora_for_ISVs.

Mission

Goals:

Create stronger bonds between Fedora and interested ISVs.
Help ISVs resolved problems unique to their situation.
Present lessons, content, and processes to the rest of the Fedora Project that help the adoption of open source software that is connected with ISVs.

How:

Announce the SIG presence within the Fedora universe
Get together on the mailing list
Find out what problems we have individually and in common
Seek out solutions to those problems
Document in the wiki, teach others
...
Profit!

Why should ISVs care?

Fedora has one of the strongest and most sustainable communities of any Linux distribution.
Fedora is the upstream for RHEL. You gain six to eighteen months testing that is before the next RHEL Alpha.
Imagine sending prospective customers, analysts, and journalists a USB key with your spin of Fedora + YourReallyCoolApp ... all ready to go, boot to a live instance, and run the real stuff.
There is a repository called EPEL that are Fedora packages rebuilt for RHEL versions. This is a great way to distribute and maintain software designed to run on RHEL.
When you package the Fedora way, you trade short-term pain (3 to 6 months) for extremely long-term gain (7 years.)
- Packages that know how to use Fedora, and therefore RHEL, system libraries and common functions are friendlier to customers, easier for ISVs to maintain, and come with a compelling value proposition similar to Red Hat's.
Invite your customers to participate or contribute directly on the next versions of your product. This is one of the biggest open source values for customers who take advantage of it.

Who

Karsten Wade, Community Gardener (Red Hat), is coordinating SIG activities.

What next?

List all your software dependencies
- Every library, package, JAR, etc. required to build your code
- You may list as a dependency software that you produce if you plan to package it separately
Check for dependencies already packaged in Fedora
- http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji
  - Search using wildcard operators, e.g. '*commons-logging' finds the jakarta-commons-logging package
  - In the Packages section, search alphabetically; packages are typically derived from the upstream package name, e.g. a Perl module Apache2::SOAP is packaged as perl-Apache2-SOAP
- This is the first vetting of your list
Take this vetted list to the SIG for common ground
- fedora-isv-sig-list
- Someone may be tracking the same dependency, chances to collaborate
- This is the second vetting
Go to a topic-specific list to ask if anyone else is working on, needs, or wants to collaborate on the remaining dependencies
- Java packaging - fedora-devel-java-list
- All other packaging - fedora-devel-list
Be prepared to modify your code to use the Fedora version of your dependencies
Following the PackagingGuidelines, submit your packages for review
- You may want to offer to trade reviews with other members of the ISV SIG

Resources for ISVs

Considering Shipping Your Product for Fedora?

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is the premier Fedora repository for packages branched and maintained for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, CentOS 5, and other Enterprise Linux derivatives.

For general technical discussions around everything from packaging to the direction of the distro, participate in fedora-devel-list.

The list for Java discussion on the same development and packaging topics is fedora-devel-java-list.

Other topical discussion lists are references on Communicate and listed on http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo.

Resources for SIG members

Join Fedora, including creating a Fedora account.

Communication

Email list -- fedora-isv-sig-list
- Archives
Weekly meetings on IRC -- not set yet
IRC channel -- #epel on irc.freenode.net

References

This SIG was created on 02 May 2008 by LeeFaus and KarstenWade.

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