 So we are here to cross collaborate and discuss that's what we're doing Yeah, so we actually have a couple more folks Slotted to join us here, but I have a feeling they will trickle in and we can They'll have to introduce themselves last So first thing we're gonna do is just do a quick round of introduction so try to keep it brief But we do want a good idea of the background That you're working with just as a nice Bees for our conversation. Hi Neil. We're just about to do a round of introductions. Oh, okay. I'm at the right time I'll go first since I'm talking already I'm Marie Norton. I am Fedora's community action impact coordinator. I have been in this role since November of 2019 previously to that I Contributed to the Fedora project mainly on badges and graphic design since 2013 when I started as an intern with Outreach II So that is my open source kind of story there and I'm going to pass it to Matthew. I Am Fedora project leader and I've been involved in Fedora since forever and Mostly in Fedora. I've dabbled in some other Linux distributions, but none of them ever stuck but You know, I appreciate the that there's all the other options out there That's cool Neil What oh? Hi My name is Neil Gampa. I've been doing this for Over a decade and a half. I think actually if I counted this morning just thinking about this in preparation. I think it's almost 18 years now of doing Linux in some form or fashion which is most of my life now and Yeah, I started with you know red hat Linux and went from red hat Linux to Fedora core and Actually for a long time ran both Ubuntu and Fedora in parallel and dabbled a little bit with Sousa Mandreva Rick Mandreva and Gen 2 arch all kind of a little bit all over the place before coming back and really settling in Fedora open Sousa magia open Mandreva And and kind of making those places my home for for stuff and things. I don't know that actually explained anything about what I do But like Everything you do everything and that kind of explained it pretty well. Yeah. Yeah, I'm in Fesco in Fedora And I'm on the board for open Sousa I'm on the board and in the council in magia and I don't know what I am in open Mandreva. That's sort of an open question, but whatever that's fine Ben, do you want to go next? Sure. I'm Ben cotton. I'm the Fedora program manager So sort of like the the chief operations officer in terms of like, you know getting releases Scheduled and out on time and I also participate in some upstreams here and there mostly as Liaison to you know from Fedora bugs up to the upstream Cool. Thanks Ben Doug do you want to go next? Sure. Yeah, I'm Douglas to my oh So I Work is sort of a community manager or marketing PR event coordinator for open Sousa. We'll do a variety of different things And and events is one of those as well. So like organizing also like reaching out to other Organizations for the sponsorship of events and boots and swag and all that other stuff I think you're the open Sousa version of me. I Think so. You're the okay. Okay. Dan's next Hi, I'm Dan. I'm a software developer working for Sousa. I've been using Linux for quite a while. I Think I've mostly stuck with Fedora where I'm More or less active in my in my free time I recently got elected to fesco because Neil nudged me. Thanks, Neil so Yeah, and besides that I well my day job is mostly coding But I've also done some QA where I've worked with the Sousa QA department and Work with open QA and also done some stuff with a them On the Fedora side Yeah, I guess that's that's mostly that's mostly it so Monica Okay, so I am Monica Ahan's Madden. I am the Ubuntu community Entitive so I work at canonical and I guess I'm kind of I'm guess I'm like kind of the U cake of sorts And I started out. I'm pretty new to open source I got started as an Ubuntu mate contributor last very early in 2020 and then I got more involved in Community kind of onboarding and also event organizing. I love tea parties. That's how I met Ben actual what Ali And so what I do at canonical is I work with our community governance help help contribute itters basically if our if there's something our community Wants to get done. I connect them to the people and the resources that they need and we do a lot of outreach and Also a lot of cross-project work. So that's what I do Cool. Thanks. We have one more person you may have to sneak his intro in once he's able to join having some technical difficulties But until that happens, I think we can jump into some of the questions that we prepared If I can find the right tab, you know, how about this? Here we go. You can just wing it Well last time. Well, that's true, right? Having some kind of a format it's gonna help us I'd say we try to you know an hour and it would be great to take some questions from The the audience so feel free to drop your Q&A as we go along If it's relevant to what we're talking about right now, I'll try to sneak that question in as well So first we can start with what cross-collaboration Currently takes place between the projects that are represented here. How did it come about? Maybe tell us a little bit about the successes or failures of those cross-collaborative efforts Yeah, I mean I can I can certainly chime in in a few places. So I already mentioned open QA, which is For those who are not not aware of that. That's a That's an operating the system testing framework That's been a user and that's used extensively by Susa and also by Fedora, which I would call I think it's pretty pretty great success in terms of cross-collaboration Because it works It I mean the system itself is operating system agnostic so in theory no one is stopping Microsoft from using it to test Windows and Fun fact that is actually that actually tests for Windows on the open Susa instance to test WSL so There's even more potential for cross-collaboration. So I think that's that's one of the examples where Working together really Release beneficial and what where it works out pretty well And on and then I myself I'm also I'm also a package for in open Susa and in Fedora and I'd say to a certain extent We're collaborating quite well, but it really it really depends on the actual ecosystem So there's some parts of the packaging communities that are collaborating very well with each other and then there are parts that Don't talk to each other at all Or that used to talk to each other and stop at some point and then diverged and never never came back Which is kind of a pity because it means that I Have to essentially I maintain certain packages in both distributions And I have to duplicate all my work and I and it's and I'd say a lot of the stuff is Is kind of arbitrary it could be it could be unified. That's not really There's not really a huge point in having having certain differences. So it would be nice if those if we could Come to terms on something something come Well that that kind of jumps off until into How this sort of happened for me like I originally started a lot of the original projects where I was kind of creating cross collaboration across distributions in particular like the door in open Susa was mostly out of frustration because At work, you know, I have to develop things that work across a variety of distributions and You know, unfortunately my deep understanding of how a Linux system works and how things are actually assembled from experience made me realize exactly how capricious and arbitrary some of it was and unlike a lot of people I had the gumption to like rationalize the Delta and so I A good chunk of it was going back and forth between Fedora and open Susa communities Figuring out where the differences are and trying to reunify them at some point and like when new ecosystems were on boarded in particular like rust for example from the very beginning I ensured that there was a Tight connection across the ecosystems to make the across the distributions to make sure that the ecosystem didn't fall apart and get fragmented Similarly like with Pearl I am trying to do this with Python now to try to reunify things the idea is that By by bringing making a collaborative we can actually take what we learned from the different communities and make a better experience for everyone on all of them and it makes it easier for the Linux platform itself to be supported by by third parties and by users and and and other, you know, you know extended members of the community You know without too much pain and suffering Because you know they under they can understand from one and apply it to another and and things generally work and That that's been a big part of my focus and while there have been some failures here and there all the balance of things I think I've actually been relatively successful in pushing for a degree of unification Across the board because I think people in to some extent are kind of exhausted at all the differences When they don't need to be there and when you can prove that they're capricious differences then It's a lot easier to make the case for them to go away and Speaking of differences Adam has joined us probably from a phone. Yep vertical video syndrome Adam Welcome, sorry you had trouble getting into the session Would you like to do a short intro? Sure, hi, I'm Adam Williamson. I work on the fedora QA team And I work with most of these folks on open QA upstream or how it is region Awesome, thanks for being here with us. So we probably moved to the next question But before I do I just wanted to make one more point about Cross-lateration that's happening successfully. Let's look at this session we've had here and at open SUSE conference and The ability to bring more of our contributors to Like partnering conferences, right? So like in the past maybe like Matthew or myself or someone would have gone to the open SUSE conference and Doug would have come to our conference and that was might have been, you know it Obviously there's there's a crossover with contributors But we can bring a lot more people to the the different events and promote that and actually more people can kind of See the cross-collaboration happening. I think that's a pretty cool side effect of being all virtual So let's move to the next question The messages of projects collaborating resonates with open source contributors Why do you think this is the case and how can we use this resonance to increase collaboration? So I think you know, it's basically the You know the entire ethos of open source, right is you know We're sharing what we know and letting other people build on it and building off the work of other people So it in a way, it seems very artificial to draw that boundary at, you know, a Linux distribution Especially when we share so many of the same upstreams and we are, you know, all participating in those upstreams like it's It's a sort of natural that we would do that And one kind of cool example that I just happened to notice on our twitter feed this morning is somebody fixed the I think it was the arch Linux bugzilla package Wasn't sending email after a pearl update and they looked at fedora's rpm and said Oh, here's this patch that fixes it and they fixed it. And I think that's cool. And then, you know, there's You know, it's kind of an answer to the second question a little bit too In the previous question I think we're a lot of times We're not collaborating in ways that we don't even know because things are open and people can just go look and you don't have to necessarily ask You can just go look and see what other people have done and build on that Matthew, did you want to jump in on this one? I I'm down on our cheat sheet for this that I had something to say But I now I feel like ben said the stuff I was going to say so I don't feel like maybe we didn't cheat sufficiently I think it's I think it's true though the point that ben made about like not knowing that it's necessarily happening like So something we worked on in fedora was a fedora zine Right and then I had some folks reach out to me on the side like There's this french wikipedia community that's making a zine Based off of the inspiration they got from the fedora zine like way different styles way different everything but they took that energy and that inspiration and Created one for themselves, which is super cool So I think ben's answer honestly is the is the answer. So I think we can move to the next one actually let's take one from the q&a So an old school view of linux distros is diametrically opposed from each other What ways are there to better tell the stories of cross collaboration and how it impacts innovation in each distro? Well, actually since as someone who is like Stuck his hand into almost all major linux distributions I even technically have some commits in the buntu and devian although, uh, not very many. I do have them Diametric opposition in philosophy or in practice or in operation is not diametric opposition In operation So like you have to untangle, you know what aspects we're actually opposing each other. So for example Between open susan fedora, there are Philosophical differences in how the distribution is ultimately structured In sense of like how our packages collected and sorted how are how are the mechanics of Of the availability handled What is the tooling that is used for it and things like that Those are not the same as Opposition into how is the software? You know going to work. How is the software going to be? necessarily Completely delivered to the user in a lot of cases we generally do align In terms of like this is the user experience that needs to be presented when the software is installed This is the functionality that must be working. This is the functionality that in some cases must not be working The number of times that we've had like synchronization conversations over like An upstream project has done something stupid. We have all tried to convince them to not do the stupid But we failed so now we need to you know coordinate on how to make sure the stupid doesn't reach our users That has happened more times than I care to count And that is you know something we all kind of share in common like those kinds of things We have a lot more in common than we do differently. I guess is what I'm trying to point get at like There are mechanics. There are some aspects and fine-grained details that are differences but The rest of it like the broad strokes of it and a lot of what we do in practice winds up being very similar and and this is why you know To some extent linux is linux, but at the same time it's not because there are differences But there's also so many commonalities along with those differences Now where you tend to stand on what you consider is important is where you pick a linux distribution that you primarily use So that's that's kind of where I see these things going It certainly doesn't stop me from talking to gen 2 folks to arch folks to Debian folks to susa folks to ubuntu folks to fedora folks to red hatters You know to the endless folks whoever like It doesn't stop that Maybe the googlers, but you know whatever Does anyone else have a response to that? Okay, then go ahead yeah You know, I think you know, there's sort of the obvious things like yeah, we're all sharing most of the same upstreams And we can you know pointing that out, but you know, I think about specifically talking about the impact on innovation like imagine how little innovation we'd be doing if we were all writing our same, you know test frameworks and our same, you know, everybody had to write their own bug tracker and like all the sort of You know operational stuff that goes into you know the process around building testing and shipping and distribution You know talking about the ways that we share some of that tooling or at least share some of the philosophy even if we're using You know launch pad versus bugzilla versus You know git lab or whatever like a lot of the philosophy is the same And so sharing that information with each other and doing it in a way where people see that we're sharing information So, you know having this session at nest and at the open susa conference And you know if we did something like a boom two conference or at a destroy agnostic conference and just getting people together and showing Hey, look, we're partnering in places where it makes sense I think then it starts Yeah, and I want to say just um I completely agree with both neal and ben That and I think neal had a great point that we have more in common than we have Aiding us but when we get people kind of to Cross over for maybe a little box that they put themselves in And just start talking with each other and sharing that experience that they have is that Where the innovation comes from is when you get that intense collaboration Between people and I think especially kind of talks like like this or even just having a culture of where These kind of activities are Promoted will help drive that innovation forward no matter what we use I really like the idea of going to a distro agnostic conference As a group of us. I think that would be really cool when people would really enjoy that So I know we'll have to keep that chat open. We have a few We have a few community managers on this call hint hint nudge nudge So I mean there used to there used to be such events like a decade ago. I mean there's no reason We couldn't have them again We know everyone on this call is overworked already. I don't know what you're talking about Oh, I know I actually have a follow-up for monica So there's a question that I have a lot to do with what you're just talking about So how will a bunch to start to help or collaborate with fedora or open susa? When one is rpm based and the other is deb base But very glad either way to see a representative from a bunch of here Well, thank you and I think that That even though yes the packaging there is that that kind of gulf there But I think some of the collaboration that we've done is more on the Community side because even though we are different distros A lot of our contribute a lot of our contributors Are contributing to multiple communities? And so a lot of the issues that our community are that we're facing We're not facing them by ourselves. We might feel like we're the only district going How do we reengage our community or how do we deal with you know with burn out or things? And then as we start kind of talking to each other We realize that this isn't something unique to our community that this is something that is happening across Enix and open source Because we're all a small group of people who have lives and jobs dealing with a global pandemic and other crises trying to do these things and so Actually been having some talks with people about Well, maybe how do we do some talks between distros on? mental health and open source contribution Which I think and those are things that it Doesn't matter where we're coming from we can collaborate and I think be even stronger Because then it's not we're not trying to do it by ourselves. We can pull those Those resources together And then another thing we can do regardless of what distro we use is to advocate for lit enix and free and open source Offward that is I mean Again, that's where we're I think We are extremely strong together and then it just you know get bring people into it Especially people who are new people who might not have feel welcome Before and just get them excited about it and then they can you know pick what distro they're going to use But I think that is you know, we have that again that kind of not united front but kind of this more Uniformly welcoming front then it then it makes for a better experience And so some of these collaborative things have already started to Happen and I think especially it's it's where dealing more with the people than with the Than with the technical aspects, but those happen to Those certainly happen to we actually have a question we can add on and you know, maybe you can Have a part of this too. We focus a lot on tech software collabs But other good examples outside of that type of teaming up So Monica you were just talking a little bit about that. I feel like Neil you're going to talk more About the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Honestly, like one of the one of the bigger things That we we wind up collaborating with across the board is really community practices um, so like Something that I've made a point of during my time Not during my time. I'm still a member of the open source of board right now but since I've started my term at the open source of board was um, adopting some of the practices that I've seen in other communities like fedora where we've got a Way for people to see what we are doing and how we're doing it and how to communicate and and Communicate what the what stuff we're doing be it technical or non technical And start to kind of adapt that practice for open susa So, you know, we deployed a pager instance last year and we're starting to use it this year You know cribbing a little bit of about how the fedora council governs itself We're using that for the open susa board to like make our our process for doing things a little bit more transparent We have started doing um public meetings Although I somewhat kind of regret it because it's 7 a.m. My time every other monday, but you know Uh, we do the public meetings and the big part of that is we want to try to you know Pull in you know pull in some of the good practices to make people feel engaged and welcome and part of the community that they're shaping even if they don't really realize it And you know that that's so the now non technical stuff and I know this was a little bit about You know, um non technical class there was also Uh, I just wanted to also mention just a tiny bit of a joke answer because like At the very beginning with the questions like yeah, well rpms and devs are different so I I backport packages from fedora to a bun two for my job like I use rpms spec files and build packages for a bun two adebian systems Pretty much as part of my job. There is there are tools out there if honestly like I maintain one such tool If it was something that The archive format matters a lot less than people think There if if we really really want to we can definitely collaborate even on a technical level and we do You know more seriously. We share patches. We share practices. We share, you know You know research we share all these sorts of things like as ben said like some time ago like the The arch maintainers of the bugzilla package, you know Find a bug looked at our package found that we fixed we fixed the bug had sent it upstream It just wasn't merged or released or whatever yet So they just cherry picked the patch and put it on there. It's like You know at the end of the day what what is what is a dev or an rpm? but a collection of build instructions and mechanisms and behaviors for um building and shipping code and those things can be translated from one format to another so and again, that's actually a total expression of People working together to try to give you a good experience with software and solutions for a free and open source platform right like it all kind of goes back to We're people trying to make something that people can use in a In line with our core principles of free software in a free community and free culture Awesome. Thank you. Neil for joining on to that. So we actually have a bunch more questions in the chat so instead of Going with our pre-arranged ones. I'm going to Speak to the audience here and uh ask The next question. Okay. Could there be a universal open data format for exchanging package info So that people could easily build package index analyzers, etc Okay, uh, does that make sense Yeah, I understand what's actually being asked here. Um Yes and no, so the it is technically possible for us to create like some Defined format that says, you know, these properties exist here and this is what they are and whatever but I don't want to go too deep in technology here But like there are still like differences in feature sets and availability That in order to make something like truly useful We'd have to bring up all the package manager functionality to be in line with each other um, so for a while RPM wasn't as as featured as the Debian system And now it's flipped like in order for something like that to Truly be useful without having to understand the underlying systems They would need to be in in alignment at to some level and I don't know if that's ever going to happen. It might But um Really what it's going to be is As long as the distribution package manager system is relatively standardized within itself Any tools you build can under can can consume that information and do something useful with it So maybe we can have a universal subset, but like if you want a truly rich comprehensive set of information I don't know it would be technically quite difficult to do without getting the package manager teams to agree On feature sets that we would move forward with and rationalize and I don't know how practical that is So one place we might do this is in the source RPM or source. I'm sorry. It's our source git idea which is Basically packaging you add a higher level up and then takes automation from an exploded Get tree to create a disk repository and so on so that could be done where if we agree on what goes in the source Git thing the way that gets translated into an actual disk it or whatever package could be done in a different way I I would also like to see us for example going from that to flat pack directly without an rpm intermediary um because The the shuffling around to build the rpms that way is kind of annoying Um, but I would like to I have that saying like we're tracking this and get as our thing rather than just pulling it from upstream Still valuable cool So I think we can move to the next question Um, I see adam's joining us again. Welcome back. Sorry. You're having a struggle Uh, but this one might actually be good for you here. We got open qa seems like One place where we can share gating on packages. Is there a cross collaboration where we see core functionality? tested for consistency in base support or package divisions Uh, it's an interesting question. Um Currently the way we collaborate with open qa is more based around the tool We don't really share any tests between fedora and suzer or any other distributions. Um I think it it's an interesting idea. Um It might potentially be the case that I believe there was talks before about known potentially Adopting open qa for some testing Which might be where this sort of thing could happen because it could be done upstream As things were landing in known they could be tested and then that sort of validation would naturally make its way to the downstream I think doing it between downstream distributions in the way the question seems to be suggesting Might be tricky since we have different release schedules and we tend to be integrating things at different times Um, so the way we use open qa in fedora is we're sort of Using it the test target is fedora. It's not any particular package in fedora. The thing we're always thinking about is Does whatever thing we're testing cause fedora to stop to to not meet the requirements we have for fedora, right? So yeah, I think it's it's an interesting idea, but it's not something we're doing right now Uh, have you curious to hear what the what other people have to think about it? So I think one So i'm also not not aware of open qa being directly used at least not by linux distributions Because at least how open qa works. It's more of a user simulator So what generally open qa does for those that don't really know it or never heard of it is that you have You essentially describe what a user would see and let them click around and that makes it That makes it relatively tricky. So I imagine adams example of gnome adopting it That would mean that once you introduce any kind of branding or theming You are essentially screwed and you can't use it anymore. But what open qa can what open qa can do is for instance Integration of the linux test framework that's used by the linux kernel itself And I think there are some companies that leverage open qa to test To test their boards to so essentially arm boards like the raspberry pi or something else And that could be so that's something where it definitely could be used but I'd say for on a On a general packaging level, I haven't really seen it so those Those distributions that use open qa. I don't think they That I haven't seen any real collaboration in terms of tests But it would be interesting to explore this idea But I don't know if open qa is the perfect tool for this job maybe Maybe open qa plus something else or something else Awesome. Does anyone else have something to add for that one? Yes, that's no. Okay. We're gonna Just jump back over to some of our pre prepared questions because I think we kind of started to hit on that So what are some of the barriers to collaboration? And how can we break down those barriers? Collaboration is hard. It's hard. It's very hard with in the project already And it often feels like More work just in general to work with somebody else to get something done than it is to Do it yourself and that's just when it's individuals And so when you take a whole bunch of individuals who are already working hard to do that extra work of collaboration and then you try to like It's like two galaxies colliding level of complexity. Um, and so Um, that that it's if there's just even more work even when we can see the benefits of being one combined super galaxy Um It it's just a lot of work. Yeah, I'm really just taking with my metaphor now here and I'm just going to go off on that for a while I think there's a lot of like personal identity problems to like If you primarily identify as a contributor to the upstream project Maybe collaborating across different different distributions You know seems natural to you if you primarily like I am a fedora contributor. I'm an open suce contributor I'm a ubuntu contributor Then you kind of see things in a different way and you're like, oh, well, I don't care about that distribution I care about mine And you know, I think that's you know, kind of natural for people in a lot of ways but also I think we have to you know sort of reemphasize the point that Contributing to fedora is also contributing to all the other distributions Um, because we're sharing this information whether we whether we're doing it intentionally or just by being open This is sort of Kind of a side thing but you know the time differences and the geographical locations that people sometimes for example when we look at the events like we have the Open Suce Asia something happening this weekend Well, you know, and it's like Neil's it's gotta get a talk there and you're looking at Timeframes, right? Like you you know where you are in the world how how much it can contribute to Um, to some of these events where we'd like to sort of have more interactions. I guess this Can be difficult. Oh my gosh Oh We will end you coffee um I think that you know Echoing what ben said is that you have the kind of that tribalism That, you know, um, it's like, um, especially for people who closely identify with contributing to one distro Uh, that's that's an issue. But I think also one of the things is Um going back to what ben and ben said it's like is that we're all doing so much work We have our full. I mean, there's a few of us who are fortunate enough that that this is part of our jobs But especially for people who are doing like I mean even for us, it's a challenge. So for people who are doing 40 50 hour jobs at other places And then trying to do work here I think it's trying to convince people of the benefits of collaboration because otherwise It just does seem like more work for the sake of work or for the sake of just some warm fuzzy feeling And it's like no it's not just it's there are clear tangible Benefits, but I think if we Don't frame it well or worse. We collaborate badly And so we're getting together, but we're not seeing those benefits then I think that's when that that can be a big hurdle Yeah, so one thing about collaboration on things, um We have to keep our marketing impulses and marketing departments in check a little bit on this because If we collaborate on something and then that results in a press release Coming out of one organization saying look at all these awesome things that we did to make performance so much better in kanom It makes the people who worked on that feel hurt As a totally hypothetical example, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, not it did not happen, right? Like that just did not ever happen Just thinking about how I've seen it like specifically we work on open qa I think like two of the practical issues can be our communication and consideration So by consideration, I mean sometimes if I'm looking at a problem that we're having in open qa Like it's causing a problem with our deployment of it And I'm thinking, you know, what can I do to fix it? I'm looking at it from the perspective of I know this is how we use the system And I know that making this change won't cause any problems for how we use it But it can be more difficult for me to think. Okay. How does another user? How does sousie that how does someone else use it is my change going to cause problems for them? um And I think a weird thing I noticed about this is that it's a problem that has a really good technical fix Which is tests Like one thing I really noticed with open qa lately like when I first got involved with it The test suite maybe wasn't the best and it didn't cover everything And I think all of us especially the sews folks are made like a concerted effort in the last couple of years To really extend the testing coverage to the point where it nearly hits Everything that all of us do with open qa. So now I know if I make a change And it breaks how sousie uses open qa. It's probably going to show up in the test suite And it's like if a test fails, I don't just get mad. I'm like, okay, that means I didn't think about something I fixed the failure in the test. It's probably not going to break anything for the other people And now it's great So I think that's that's kind of an interesting situation where a potentially complicated problem has a really Good practical solution which has worked out really well and by communication I just mean another thing I really appreciate with open qa is not just the formal Communication in the sense of bug reports and so on is in the open and you know, it's developed on a github So we all look there the issues are reported there for request of that Even the sort of casual back check communication Happens in a public channel like an irc channel or matrix channel, which is really great because sometimes It can especially within working within a company It can be tempting to just kind of pull the casual, you know Watercool conversations into some kind of internal channel where no one else ever sees them And that can be an issue because then maybe you can see what happened in Public but you can't see the background to it where that idea came from why this thing is happening in the first place Whereas when all that stuff is in public too, you get to see all of those things as well Cool. Those were some good points. I like the part about Um, the last point you made about being it's sometimes being easier to chat like I'll bring up google chat to talk to these dudes all the time Well, some of it, you know, it's just like Banter throughout the day, but some of it could probably go out there. So I don't know. That's a that's an interesting point There's another question in the chat. I think we should get to Is there a way for so many distros working and sharing ideas To act as a liaison to cloud vendors and other big downstream users of our collective linux platforms Oh boy, nobody asks the simple questions. Do they Um This this is one of those things that gets kind of difficult because it crosses between Technology and marketing and when it crosses with marketing everything gets very very hard um and But but there are definitely certain things that makes it Um, something that it would be worth it. So like for example When it is difficult for um community Linux platforms to be able to You know Do work and support, uh, you know, kind of the requirements that a cloud provider Makes of them to be available there Um, you know having the assistance of another Uh Big name or another community or multiple communities That makes it much more difficult to ignore like I'll just kind of say it's collective bargaining, right? Like this is essentially The linux community is doing collective bargaining to make it so that You know, things are more equitable and more fair For us to be able to be on those platforms like I know of a couple of examples I know matthew it would have frowny faces if I said any of them kind of out loud But like I know of a couple of examples where um It has been extraordinarily difficult to the point that we've Nearly not been able to do certain things and in some cases we haven't been able to at all because um cloud platforms Uh, uh, some cloud platforms just make it Sorbitantly difficult To be able to have a fair footing And be on them to show our wares and make our platforms available to people where they want them uh, you know Some degree you you need support from others to collectively say like we're gonna pull the plug if you Or or do or do something, you know much stronger than that if you're not gonna You know come down and work with us on a level that we can actually Safely do it. Um, but again, this is all complicated by You know marketing and businessy type things that You know, it makes it hard for for these kinds of things to happen. I would personally love For, you know, for me to say like hey susa people red hat people a canonicalers Can we can we like pow wow and like come back to the to the Cloud people that are making our lives hard and say hey You know, this is you know, we've previously been doing this before we realize this is kind of like not great And we did we we don't want to keep doing this and we want and we want you to make this more fair for for the open source community as a large at large but I don't know like it. This is one of those it's one of those hard things that like really requires some kind of Really willing to cut you know cut some You know pull some political strings to make it happen and I just don't know where that's going to come from Sounds a little rambly, but like I don't have a solid answer for anybody for this Yeah, a lot of this is hard because the cloud providers have a certain view of how things are going to work And they are expecting vendor to vendor relationships not community relationships and You know even with You know a lot of people amazon who get it Even with you know people at microsoft do get it You know, it's it's just a different way of looking at things and it's hard Yeah I think that ends up being easier for like ubuntu because of their model of having you know one one distro for both The community and the the supported thing. It's harder for open susa versus susa linux and you know fedora versus rel on on those things because They've got in in those cases. There's one thing that easily fits into the model and then something that they don't know how to work with Yeah, and I would We are kind of in a unique situation Compared to some of the other on distros that are represented here, but I will agree with neil that it's Not letting your marketing departments kind of take community initiatives and be like oh customers and you're just like Stay back. So and but I think that this is it's An extremely admirable goal But agreed with everybody else. I'm not quite sure how he All right. I think we kind of might have a consensus on that one if anyone has ideas put it in the chat um So we have a little bit more time If you have any questions make sure to add them now so we could potentially get to them But I will go with this one time zones are hard Video calls are now in overabundance and we've been to one too many virtual conferences. It's not nasco. Anyway Collaboration can sometimes feel like a drag on innovation Because of the required effort to communicate and synchronize with many different people How do you overcome that feeling? We kind of touched on this a little bit I think a big part of it is I mean Yeah Being on video calls all the time really stinks on ice, but I think you know adding in a lot of the social element where it's you know Especially if there's sort of like a common thing playing games together and stuff like that Uh, you know that helps make it feel less like work um, even if it's still staring at a bunch of people's uh in rectangular boxes um into the time zones part particularly I think Trying to do your communication Asynchronous asynchronously whenever possible so that people who are in different time zones can participate on equal footing um and giving people You know time I think might have been Justin that said this uh, uh, I think in a FOSDEM talk a couple years ago But you know wait 24 hours before you merge a poll request just so people have time to You know come in and make their own comments You know unless it's like super obvious trivial If you happen to be in the same time zone as the person and you close it within 30 minutes that shuts out You know the rest of the world basically from participating Just to pick up on Ben's point I think there's like an underlying thing there not even don't merge the poll request quickly but have poll requests Is an important one like it would kind of means bait communication into the process don't If you someone is innovating away at their own desk just writing stuff and pushing it out then A way to avoid that is to just not allow it like again going back to open qa You really can't land anything in open qa without a poll request. Nobody can no I can't nobody at sue's can everything goes through Everything has to go to a poll request and someone has to sign off on it And you can't always do that with every project because they just don't have the Scale once you reach the point where there are enough active contributors that you can do that I think the projects that do it Come out better than the projects that still have you know one or two people who can just work away and nobody They never have to talk to anyone nobody reviews their work If you make everyone go through the process then you're going to get more communication and You won't have issues where some people have privileges that the other people don't Yeah, I just like to add more on a technical view that I self try to try to force myself to do collaboration if there's Let's say that I would maintain I would maintain a package and of course initially it's far easier to say Hey I know this will fix a bug and I can just throw out this patch and Keep this keep this patch now in in my niche And that may that might be easier in the in the short term But one but it definitely kills the whole point of the I mean it kills the point of collaboration and then I lose all the benefits of If I submit my fix upstream a someone will take a look and will tell me Hey, yeah, this will break in case b that you didn't consider because well, you didn't write the project and second I'll lose on our I'll lose out on all the testing that all the other people will do if I submit it upstream and yeah It's initially it's more work But I think it's uh, it's definitely a net benefit in the long in the long run And so if at some point I feel like yeah This will but now to send this pull request upstream. I can just keep this patch, but then I know yeah but you know Once the divergence has become really huge it will be a huge pain and So usually the benefits outweigh this additional work Oh, um, so I think that um, I know this is going back to what Ben I think what Ben said at first that having these kind of social events and I think especially at like the you know things like Gwadec where I I think I got to meet some of you possibly for the first time Because that's kind of uh for some of us. That's a very natural place to meet But also I think um, just having these little, you know, like game nights Or socials or things that we're doing where especially where we just need Last year was really stressful this year Aping up to be equally stressful And having things where we can kind of collectively blow off steam Um and get to know each other as people are Really good and also this is going to sound Really kind of cliche for me But um, yeah, if you can have things where you know, you you're having like food classes like oh my gosh Like seeing like people do food classes together and tea tastings and coffee things and it's just Getting together with people over food is really powerful We all love to do it in person if we can find ways to do it virtually, you know to break bread then that's always Nice too, but I think finding different ways to socialize with each uh with each other is and I think just input, you know, it's um Having a distro social hour. That would be fantastic Cool. So I think we're almost there. Oh math you go ahead I just our our fedora social hour is susa social hour half the time anyways, so Just come join us I did I came to one of your social hours got to learn the history of beefing miracle So I think that was also the same time where we decided we were gonna have the fpl show up uh for nest Because that was also, uh, I think I was Was that that one or that might have been the one where I did the unboxing of open suits a leap on it, uh In there. I forget which one was that but yeah, like all of us show up and do and just randomly take over. It's fine Reminds me of the candy swap Yeah, I think that also was the one where we decided that the open Usa box was a calzone Yes Yeah, we're looking at our distro boxes And and that's why matthew asked that on the on twitter about the fedora deluxe distro box set thing because I was like, I was so I was unusually happy about unboxing Uh open suits a leap even though I wasn't going to use what was included in it So we're almost to the end of our time I wanted to add on one more thing about the whole how do you overcome the virtual fatigue and I think I'm actually talking to myself right now, but take care of yourself Um take breaks don't work 12 hours in a row neil. Yes. I'm looking at you definitely You know just this is not all to life and on top of You know the virtual fatigue like life outside of this has been difficult I'm pretty sure I can say for everyone. We've all faced numerous amounts of challenges different ones widely different ones, but We're all working through challenges. Make sure to take care of yourself And on that note, I think we can say Bye and thank you to everyone for joining us for the panel for the panelists and the attendees and everyone who asked Some awesome questions. So see you around Messed and uh Today's last afternoon and I dropped the work adventure link too. See you. Thanks Marie. Thanks