New hire orientation

Max's notes

• Max's notes (internal Red Hat only, sorry!) are here.

Mel's notes

From Max's talk

• The way Red Hat's software is made is the open source way.
  • Fedora as supply chain to RHEL
  • Licensing
  • Why is the open source way different?
• Communities are not the borg! There are many of them, with many people, with many views. There is no uni-mind.
• Red Hat's mission: to be the trusted open source leader.
• On the importance of "giving back" to our upstream communities - it's our responsibility to do so, and also how we can steer and influence people who have free will over what they want to do, since we can't order volunteers to work on things; the idea itself needs to have merit and also manpower behind it.
• RHEL is a 7-year maintenance load.
  • Relationships with people in the FOSS community interested in that maintenance and able to help with it makes all the difference.
  • Engineering metric of success: how much can you make happen, not how much can you do yourself? Communicate with the community!
• FAQ: How do you keep quality control if anyone can contribute?
• Note: RHEL/Fedora is a stability/innovation split strategy.
• FAQ: How do new packages get into Fedora?
• The open source way lets us preview what customers want. Actually, they make what they want, and then pay us to sell it to them.
  • SELinux
  • AMQP
• FAQ: How many contributors to Fedora are there?
• Open question: what's the JBoss equivalent for this?
• FAQ: What's the motivation for contributors to contribute? It helps them do their job better. For instance, mmcgrath before he worked for Red Hat.

Activity ideas

These are not meant to be comprehensible to other people, they're just to remind myself of things I'd like to try. Mel Chua 20:26, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

• Give all but one table a puzzle and a lead.
• Tell the no-puzzle table to clear their table. They are Red Hat. Roles:
  • Project leader - ship on time
  • QA - no blank spots in the quilt
  • Engineer - orange border
  • Engineer - green corners
• Other teams come in with parts and reqs
  • orange border
  • green corners
  • some sort of dinosaur in the middle (mid-round RFE)
• QA goes and "patches" and ships

Terminology:

• requirements
• patches
• "upstream" (pile)
• mid-round contributions / code dumps
• bug report / RFE
• community of practice