Eric Hendricks: A couple of episodes ago, we interviewed Carl George about extra packages for Enterprise Linux, better known as EPEL. And in that episode, we talked a lot about a fellow community project called CentOS. And so we got a lot of questions about what is CentOS, how does it relate to Fedora? And so we figured, what better opportunity than an episode of this show to talk about a very closely related project in CentOS? Hey there, and welcome to the Fedora Podcast. I'm your host. I'm one of your hosts, Eric "the IT Guy" Hendricks. I'm so excited to be talking about CentOS today, both the community and the project. This is episode 59, but it would not be an episode of the Fedora Podcast if I didn't bring in someone to get all of my jokes and all of my references. And that, of course, is the Ask Noah guy himself, Noah Chelliah. Welcome to the Fedora Podcast, my friend.

Noah Chelliah: Hello, hello. Thanks for welcoming me.

Eric Hendricks: Thanks for being here. You can tell we've done this for a number of years. Although, piece of personal news. Noah, I am proud to announce that after last episode's debacle, I went and re-watched Hackers. So I now finally, after a couple of weeks, get your roof leak reference.

Noah Chelliah: That's great. You're ready to hack the Gibson. This is awesome. This is a better episode already.

Eric Hendricks: So, Noah, we have a full house today. I don't think we've ever had this many guests on the Fedora podcast before. But we're going to have a bit of a panel, if you will, about CentOS Linux and the CentOS community.

Noah Chelliah: Awesome. Let's welcome them in.

Eric Hendricks: Yeah, so first up is Shaun McCance. I'm just going to go down my list. This is by no means in any priority order, just going down the list here. Shaun McCance, why don't you tell us who you are, what you do, and what you do for technically Red Hat. And then, of course, everyone's favorite question, what do you do for fun?

Shaun McCance: Oh, goodness. Okay. Hi, I'm Shaun McCance. I work for Red Hat as the CentOS Community Architect, which means that I take care of non-technical things around the project. So I'm the one who puts on CentOS Connect, the main CentOS Contributor Conference. I handle the blog and the social media and the outreach and other stuff like that. I also, as of a couple of weeks ago, happen to be the Fedora Community Architect. So kind of a dual role in doing both of those things. As for fun, I guess a few things but I do like video games I'm a huge Zelda nerd actually which if you look there's always like Zelda stuff in the background of my shot

Eric Hendricks: So you must be really excited about the remaster that's getting ready to come.

Shaun McCance: Out I'm pretty stoked about that,

Eric Hendricks: Yeah that's awesome, and speaking of Fedora Community Architect shameless self plug for the show you need to hit the subscribe button like right now because is not the next episode, but two episodes from now. So about a month from now, we're actually going to be interviewing Shaun and Justin, who are the now current and former community architects about Fedora. And we'll talk a little bit about what that position is, some plans for the projects, that kind of thing. So not only do you get a shameless plug, but also a little bit of a sneak peek for an upcoming episode. Up next on my list is Amy Marrich. Amy, welcome to the Fedora Podcast.

Amy Marrich: Thanks for having me.

Eric Hendricks: Yeah, so tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, what you do for CentOS and or Fedora, and the crowd-mandated question of what's something you do for fun.

Amy Marrich: I'm also employed by Red Hat. I am the technical marketing manager focusing on OpenStack, so nothing Linux-related. And I serve as the chair of the board for CentOS. As far as for fun, I ride horses and train dogs for agility.

Noah Chelliah: Oh, cool.

Eric Hendricks: Now, today's panel of people is the exception to the rule that most people that work in open source don't get paid to work on open source. So today's kind of the exception to that rule. But that's awesome that you actually work on OpenStack by day and CentOS by night. That's really cool. And last but not least, the amazing, the incredible, the well-dressed man, Mr. Troy Dawson himself.

Troy Dawson: Well, I will claim one of those things. I think I'm well-dressed. Same questions?

Eric Hendricks: Same questions. Who are you and what do you do and why are you here and what do you do for fun?

Troy Dawson: So my name is Troy Dawson. I also currently work for Red Hat. I am currently the CentOS Stream team lead. What do I do for fun? I actually build operating systems for fun. If I wasn't building CentOS Stream, I would be building CentOS Stream.

Noah Chelliah: That's a great answer. You're in the right position.

Eric Hendricks: Right.

Troy Dawson: And as a result of that, that's one of the things I do for fun. I'm building, I'm on the CentOS board, but I'm also on the CentOS ISA SIG where I am building CentOS Stream on RISC-V, as well as alternative images SIG, which where I build images, alternative CentOS images, as well as right now I'm working on the RISC-V images. And because that's too much computer stuff I also sew so not only am I well dressed I've made I'm designed to make these shirts and I love penguins as you can see and make the stuff penguins in the stuff

Noah Chelliah: So what I'm hearing is Troy and Amy have the most well balanced lives Eric

Eric Hendricks: That's what I hear as well.

Noah Chelliah: All consumed by nerdisms

Shaun McCance: Unlike Shaun i'm always in front of a screen apparently yes

Noah Chelliah: You and me both buddy

Eric Hendricks: I hear that so today yeah go ahead.

Noah Chelliah: What is tell me a little bit about the origins of CentOS i understand that you know it's i think we know it's it's it's a community rebuild of red hat enterprise linux but where did it come from why does it exist in in what state does it exist now

Amy Marrich: I think I can take that. So back in the day, CentOS Linux was a rebuild of RHEL. It was a trailing project. It was basically a clone of RHEL. What it is now, it is the CentOS project and CentOS Stream. So we call the community the project. And what comes out of the project is stream or what comes out of the individual sigs. As Troy already mentioned, he's rebuilding for RISC-V and other platforms. There's Hyperscale, which specifically makes a version of CentOS that is used on big Hyperscale environments. So what it was and what it is now is two different places in the lifecycle. We are actually closer to Fedora now than we were because we take the ELN version of Fedora, we get it where we want it, we make a cut, do a little more work on it, and then we have a pre-release, a release, which then becomes the next version of RHEL. So it's a little it's more open source some people would say now because you can contribute to it especially in the SIGs whereas before it was taking what existed in RHEL using those source packages changing out Shadowman and making it CentOS. Does that help explain it?

Noah Chelliah: It does. Can you define, you used a term, an abbreviation it was an ELN. Can you help define that a little bit for us?

Troy Dawson: Do you want me to take that one Amy?

Amy Marrich: Yeah, you take it.

Troy Dawson: I was going to say that's part of my team that I'm working with. Fedora ELN is Fedora, Fedora Rawhide, the packages, the subset of packages that would go into RHEL, recompiled with the flags and other tags set to what RHEL would have them. Sometimes the biggest example people always use is Btrfs. RHEL does not have Btrfs, Fedora does. That flag has been turned off in RHEL and Fedora ELN. The reason we do this is because there's a lot of, in the spec files, the RPM files that find the RPM, there's a lot of, if Fedora, And, or if this or if that, and when they build, we want to make sure they don't break on RHEL.

Eric Hendricks: Okay. So I think, I think what, what the kind of the imagery that you want to use, and I use this all the time when I was a Red Hatter, picture the upstream GitHub repository where the Linux kernel lives. We've talked on the show a number of times about how Fedora, Rawhide in particular, pulls from that upstream repo. And those are the packages that we rebuild, that Fedora has opinions about how a kernel should operate, what flags are compiled, what hardware platforms we're going to compile for. And that eventually becomes Fedora Rawhide, which becomes Fedora Linux, whether that's a server variant or the desktop variant. So you start to picture a river we refer to as upstream and downstream. So at the top, you've got Linus Torvalds and his team, the Linux team that built the Linux kernel. And then you've got Fedora. And then in the olden times, back when I first started as a Linux systems administrator, then you had Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So you'd see Fedora and it was very developer focused, very end user focused. And then it would get sucked into Red Hat, all the enterprise-y things would happen. And then you'd get versions of Linux. You'd get versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This was, of course, after the split between Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux. Correct me if I'm wrong. But after RHEL, then downstream of RHEL, you'd have CentOS Linux. And that's what a lot of people think of when they think of CentOS, which, by the way, stands for Community Enterprise Operating System. So fun fact, put that in your trivia bag. You may need it at some point. So you'd have upstream, you'd have Fedora, you'd have RHEL, then you'd have CentOS Linux. About, goodness, what was that, 2022, 2021?

Troy Dawson: RHEL 9.

Eric Hendricks: Yeah, right around RHEL 9. That switch, CentOS Linux retired, and CentOS Stream didn't really take its place. But now CentOS Stream sits squarely in between Fedora and RHEL. So like Amy was talking about, it's much, much more open source now because Red Hat partners, individual contributors, different SIGs. SIGs are incredibly popular with CentOS. special interest groups. So you have a Hyperscale SIG, you have a cloud SIG, you have all these different special interest groups that are developing something specific. Now all of these partners and all of these communities can actually contribute directly to CentOS Stream and know that at most, probably, it'll be three years guaranteed that you will get a new feature or a new file system or whatever into RHEL because you know that every three years RHEL builds a new major version. So CentOS Stream, kind of leads that a little bit. Did I miss anything?

Amy Marrich: I think it's important also to note, because Troy mentioned Btrfs, that, for instance, the hyperscale SIG uses it. So they bring in Btrfs. They make their own kernel. So there are ways of getting that sooner or also getting features that will never make it to RHEL or could make it to RHEL, but they're farther down the line, require BU, you know, and other communications. That are internal that we're not involved in necessarily, but the users can make what they need out of CentOS Stream, especially in the SIGs.

Noah Chelliah: Talk to me a little bit about Red Hat beginning to sponsor CentOS and the governmental board that is formed. So the project is community governed, and yet it gets its funding from Red Hat. Can you talk a little bit about that relationship and the support that Red Hat gives to CentOS?

Shaun McCance: As Amy pointed out, it's important to distinguish between the project and the deliverables. So CentOS Stream, because it contains what the next minor version of RHEL will have, the maintenance for CentOS Stream is RHEL maintenance, and it's built and developed by RHEL engineers. But as we talked about, the SIGs can make whatever they want. They can build on that, and they do. So Red Hat, of course, CentOS Stream is extremely important to Red Hat because it's how RHEL is built. But, you know, Red Hat wants to see the kinds of things that we do in the SIGS. It gives an indication of where the community is interested in going, where potential customers are interested in going. So Red Hat does, you know, fund the project as a whole. We, you know, Red Hat provides build infrastructure and community infrastructure and sponsors the conference and, you know, CentOS presence at various events just because it's important for the long term development of Red Hat's product portfolio. And I think that's the same answer, you know, for Fedora. Fedora is a little bit more, I'd say, quite a bit more forward looking. Right. But, you know, Red Hat is also sponsoring that because it's important for the long term health of Red Hat's products.

Amy Marrich: And just to add a little bit about the governance, there is only one member of the board who speaks as Red Hat. And that is our liaison to the BU. The rest of us, even if we are employed by Red Hat, we are really speaking for the community. How I got involved was I started attending as part of the cloud sig and just started answering questions about governance because I have a history of being on other boards and I was nominated and elected onto the board so it's not because I'm a red hatter that I'm on the board and it's not because I'm a red hatter that I am chair so I think that's important to note there is nothing in the governance that says there can only be so many people from a company. But just because you're a red hatter does not mean you will be elected to the board. So we're actually very happy that we have people from Fermilab and Meta and Microsoft. We used to have someone from CERN until he moved projects, so he stepped down. So having a wide base of members is also very important on the board. So we get a really good idea and have really good conversations on different industries. And that helps us to make our decisions on how to govern the project.

Noah Chelliah: So lots of support, but not to the point that there's a conflict and or it's necessarily dominated. There's separate interests. You have freedom and autonomy as the CentOS project, apart from Deja, we'll call it. Can you talk to me about the core distinction that most people miss when they hear CentOS, particularly when they're comparing it to red hat or fedora what would you say is is is the definition of that core distinction

Troy Dawson: And let me take that part centos linux no longer exists centos linux was 10 years of support centos stream is five years of support so i think we've already mentioned before centos linux was downstream centos stream is upstream oh now i forgot the actual question. Let me explain Stream and the integration between Fedora ELN, Stream, and the current edition of Stream and RHEL because it's changed over the past year. In my opinion, in a much better way. We've mentioned the Fedora ELN goes into CentOS Stream and then into RHEL, but the tie between RHEL and CentOS Stream has become extremely tight. When the RHEL developer makes a change, glibc, vi, or vim, or whatever it is, they make that change in the CentOS Stream GitLab repository. When they do that, it immediately gets built and checked on both RHEL and CentOS Stream at the same time. That exact same code gets built on CentOS Stream and RHEL at the same time. It then goes through various tests. And that packager, if they're happy with it and they pass all their tests, they say, you know, they will just say a checkbox. They make a checkbox. And it then gets... Marked, we call it pending, but it doesn't really matter. But it goes into CentOS Stream pretty much immediately. And then for RHEL, RHEL has a six-month release cadence. But CentOS Stream has a one-week release cadence. So you're going to see that update. I'm going to use Vim as the example, even though it doesn't get updated very much. You're going to see that update in Vim in one week. But in RHEL the next RHEL is say 10.3 it's going to be you know one two to six months before you're going to see that updated vim and that's where currently this stream and RHEL is tied together and it's it's very tight it used to It used to be different the year before it would be built on centos and there's this hand passing back and forth now it's very tightly integrated And this allows, I'm going to say customers, but it's not just customers, users, clones, and Linux uses our stuff so that people can see what's coming into RHEL in the next thing. And they get a preview immediately instead of having to wait six months or be a special partner to get a beta preview. And so the central stream stuff right now is really tied in with RHEL and it's, it is tying the central stream part closer to the RHEL environment. But then we come to the community part and that's where I can't remember what your question was.

Noah Chelliah: Absolutely. So basically just looking for that distinction of what is the definition of stream and how does that track compared to RHEL?

Troy Dawson: Oh, then I think I answered it pretty well, I hope.

Noah Chelliah: Very much so.

Eric Hendricks: So my follow-up would be that a lot of people just assume that CentOS Stream is just the unofficial RHEL beta, which I argue strongly against. So my question is, what use cases are we seeing for CentOS Stream? Who's out there using it?

Troy Dawson: Oh, Shaun or Amy, if you want to answer, you can, but I have a good answer for this. Go ahead. There's three main people. There's... Industry, big companies, Since they're on our board, I think, some of these big companies that are on CentOS's board, they use RHEL, but they also use CentOS to see what's coming down the pipe. And in the case of Meta, they actually have people that test and say, oh, this is coming down the pipe. And if they see something they don't like, they will actually interact with our developers. Sometimes developers say, no, that's still going to happen. Or sometimes they will actually be able to influence. So there's those big companies doing it. There's also the users, and I fall under this thing. I like a three-year cadence, meaning I install CentOS Stream 10, and I'm going to stay on it for three years. And I don't have to worry about every six months having this big update because I get an update once a week. It's stable. It's been tested. So there's that other things that people are actually using it. Should you use it as your production if you're a big company probably not but is it stable for personal use and I'll say small business use yeah if you're not If you're needing to using it to make millions of dollars you really need the support that RHEL is going to give you and but and then the third people I could have sworn there was three groups of people.

Eric Hendricks: I do that all the time.

Troy Dawson: So anyway, Shaun and Amy, if you have different.

Amy Marrich: Yeah, I'll add on to that because two years ago at Red Hat Summit, we actually had this as part of a talk on community day. And it was like why you should be using it, who should be using it. And it's great for partners, which Troy didn't mention. You know, you can be working on your drivers, make sure it's working so that when the next release comes out, you know you're good. Even those businesses to make sure that their code is going to run when they upgrade, they can get ahead of the curve by knowing that they've got these machines and they're running their code and everything's happy. And when it comes time to upgrade to the RHEL version, they know they're good. So another good reason to use it is Feedback Loop. And I always talk about Feedback Loop because if we don't know what's going on and what's working, what's not working, then we can't improve. And this goes not just for CentOS Stream, but every open source project I'm involved in. Because if we're not getting the feedback from the people using it, we can't make new features, we can't fix bugs. So having people working on things that are not quite released yet in the product allows us to make sure that when it does get released, there's minimal bugs if no bugs you know there's never going to be no bugs let's be real but you know you can minimize the impact of that next upgrade

Troy Dawson: Can I add on to that Amy yeah I just want to also interject that CentOS Stream bugs, 99% of the times are RHEL bugs. And when you go to report a bug, which we love feedback and I appreciate it, don't necessarily send it to the CentOS Stream team because that will come to me and I am not the expert on the kernel drivers or the various things. I will forward your thing to the people. But go ahead and just click RHEL and select vim or whatever the package is. And, but then mark CentOS Stream and go ahead for that. I'm happy to take your bugs, but 99% of the time it's not for me.

Eric Hendricks: I think that's a great way to look at it. Hardware drivers was something that came to mind as well, Amy. Carl George and I have talked on a couple of different shows about how much easier it is on the EPEL team. I was working on the RHEL BU team when RHEL 9 came out. And just the sheer number of packages that Red Hat partners, people that build software to run on top of RHEL, whether it's a database or some kind of a web front end, they have some kind of product. The amount of people that were excited when RHEL 9 came out because they were able to build on CentOS Stream 9 well ahead of the RHEL 9 release and being able to just say, hey, guess what? RHEL 9.0 was just announced at Red Hat Summit. The ISOs, the packages, they're all available today. And guess what? Day one, we can release our database or our web front end or whatever our product is. We release on the same exact day because we've spent the last six, eight, however many months building against Stream 9, and we're ready to go. So if you want to do a major version, if you want to do a leap upgrade today, we're ready to go. And I just know that got even better with RHEL 10, and I'm sure RHEL 11 will see a similar improvement when Stream 11 comes out here in a couple of years. It made the CentOS and RHEL relationship just so much smoother, so much better for everyone involved. So we talked a lot about CentOS Stream and RHEL. So I kind of want to kind of flip this over on its head and ask the question, maybe, Shaun, I'll throw this one to you first. What does that relationship look like between Fedora and CentOS? First, the projects, and then the software. Yeah.

Shaun McCance: Sure. So as we mentioned, we make a cut of CentOS Stream from ELN, which is effectively Rawhide built as if it was RHEL. But those releases more or less coincide with a Fedora release. So, you know, Fedora Linux has a new release every six months. CentOS Stream has a new release every three years. So it's every, well, how, you know, do the math. That's six releases, I suppose, right? I have a degree in math. I should be able to do that quickly. So every three years.

Eric Hendricks: Carry the four square roots. Yeah, I think your math is right there, Shaun.

Shaun McCance: Right by eye. Got it. So every three years, we make a cut from ELN. And it's basically starting from or has more or less the package set or the package versions of the package it does have as the corresponding Fedora Linux release. Although, obviously, as we talked about, you know, it is different. So it's important, I think, if you want to see something, if you want to see something in CentOS Stream 11, if you want to see something in RHEL 11, you should be working in Fedora right now. Right. That's the way to do it. And if you look at the people in the community that are in the CentOS community that are doing work in our various SIGs and are trying to make good use of CentOS, they're all Fedora contributors. I think every single one of them, they might identify first as CentOS contributors, but the fact is, Fedora is how work gets done to make things happen in CentOS. So obviously, I mean, Fedora is the upstream of CentOS, and it's a very important project for us.

Amy Marrich: And I think it's also important to note that we share things like the FAS account. So there's a lot of integration between the two projects. We're on their matrix server. I think our mailing list might run off of their mail server as well these days. So there's a lot of integration between the two. And that's a good thing because they are our upstream. So being on very good terms with them, working closely with them is important. You know, it helps to make decisions more smooth between the two groups as well. So it's not just technical that it helps but community-wise as well a lot of times you'll actually see us sharing booths places sean even made a tablecloth that is half fedora half CentOS so when we're you know in the booth together we're well branded but you'll see pop people crossing to both sides of the table to answer questions and it's a great way to run the communities

Noah Chelliah: Amy, you talked a little bit about the makeup of the governing board. Can you talk to me a little bit about the mechanics of how CentOS is governed today? What role do special interest groups play? Talk to me a little bit about the governance model.

Amy Marrich: So looking from the board down, it is a self, well, it's dominated from within the community, voted by the board itself for any new members. Shaun twice a year checks with the two different cohorts. Is everyone happy? Is everyone staying? Do we need to have an election? And basically we are overseeing things like copyrights and new SIGs coming in. But we also now have what we call the SIG Council, which is made up of the SIG chairs or their representatives. The board has a non-voting seat, but to be involved in the council, we also have a couple slots for if we need RHEL representation, we can ask those people to attend. You know, so we have it so that we can make technical decisions. And the idea being that we can make technical decisions faster. We also have what is called Freckle, which is the Fedora, Red Hat, and CentOS Leadership. And it's just a group that gets together weekly and discuss different things between the communities, things that are going on within Red Hat. So just it's non-binding. It's just conversations, but it gives us a heads up of what's going on. And then there's the SIGs themselves. So what we ask of the SIGs is that they have leadership chair, co-chair, to some degree, they're self-governing. If they need something like, hey, we need a new server that's going to cost X amount of money, you know, that has to come to the board. But for them to make a decision that they want Btrfs, have fun. Make your release with Btrfs. So it allows for a lot of independence and decision-making within those groups.

Noah Chelliah: And if somebody wanted to get involved either by way of governance or maybe they want to get involved in the project, what would you point them to as kind of a starting point, as a launchpad to learn more about the project and get their feet wet?

Amy Marrich: We're always making improvements to the documentation because when we migrated it some stuff like the wiki's really old but it's still available so docs is always a great place to get started but i say that about every community because if you're using something and you see something's wrong with the documentation please send an update to that documentation if you can't figure out how to make your own update open a bug you know so that we can get it fixed because if we don't know about it, because sometimes when you use something regularly and you're going through instructions, you skip a part because you know it exists or it's in the documentation, but you know, you don't have to do it. So you just skip it. So docs is always, always a great place to start. But look at the different SIGs and see if there's something that really interests you. Most of them are very obvious on what they are. Hyperscale works on Hyperscale. Cloud is a little different in that it's half RDO, which is OpenStack, and half OKD, which is Kubernetes. But cloud made the best sense to put it there. But if you know cloud SIG and Fedora, it is more running on cloud versus cloud infrastructure, which is what CentOS is. So there's definitely different groups that you can find something that meets your interest. You love working on kernels. There's Kmod. So there's hopefully something for everybody's interest. Check us out on Matrix. We've got mailing lists. You can ask questions. Hey, I'd like to get involved. Where's a good place to start? I love helping people getting started in open source. Recently at SCaLE this past year, we did what was called actually a Fedora hatch. It was a lot of open CentOS people involved in it, but it was called Fedora Hatch. And we started the day with how to get started in open source with a focus on Fedora and CentOS.

Noah Chelliah: Eric, are you noticing a pattern of all of the people that say, when in doubt, get started with documentation? It's almost as if there's this massive need across all open source projects, and it's almost as if that's always the way in. There's a massive need. So if anybody even doesn't know that they want to get started with something, maybe pick documentation for a particular project or a flavor of your choice and go help out.

Troy Dawson: I just wanted to add one thing because I noticed Amy didn't say this one particular thing centos.org the web page has been updated much to Shaun's thank you Shaun and it's much easier to get so you can find that documentation you can find those SIGs start at centos.org

Shaun McCance: And then everything

Troy Dawson: Else Amy said

Shaun McCance: Can I add one too because you mentioned some SIGs that do packaging work and maybe the packages they're doing are not in your wheelhouse, but there's a really large repository of packages in Apple. And Apple is technically under the Fedora umbrella, but I'm telling you, if you contribute to Apple, I consider you a CentOS contributor because it is, I think, vital to most CentOS installations.

Amy Marrich: We fight over who Apple should belong to.

Eric Hendricks: . So, Noah, to your point, I thought you were going to point out that to get involved with CentOS that you had to join Matrix, which, by the way.

Noah Chelliah: If you go back and watch the recording, I get a huge grin on my face. I just didn't feel the need to distract us again.

Eric Hendricks: But actually, if you're interested in getting connected with either of these communities, you can actually go back and watch our previous episode where Noah and I sit down and we literally go through a list of things on how to get connected with Fedora specifically. But as Amy's pointed out.

Noah Chelliah: Half that episode is Matrix.

Eric Hendricks: Half the episode, almost literally half the episode is talking about Matrix and how awesome it is. And we actually had about a dozen or so people join the Fedora podcast Matrix Room. So if you're new to our Matrix Room, thank you so much for joining. The conversation's been great this past week. Most of it's been making fun of me for not remembering a line from hackers. But, you know, hey, we live and let live. But no, I had two thoughts about that, about some of these connections that Amy was talking about. And by the way, all of these, there will be links and resources in the show notes. Noah and I spend quite a bit of time trying to put those together. So make sure you check out the show notes for a lot of these links. But I had two thoughts on that. First off is all these projects are put together by a shoestring group of developers, some of which spend, crazy people like Troy who spend their work hours building CentOS Stream and then are just crazy enough that they spend, their non-work hours working on CentOS Stream. But for a lot of these projects each each of these spaces has one two maybe three core people that own it and love it and and they're they're kind of dare i say a sort of a moderator of of that, almost like a volunteer team lead but for the most part all of these projects anything in open source still needs people one of the scariest things that i'd ever heard when i was working for Red Hat was that OpenSSL, yes, OpenSSL, the thing that helps secure web traffic. It has like three people that work on it. Three people manage a package that touches almost every packet that goes out over the internet. Think about that. I mean, just to log into a website, what, a thousand packets go back and forth just to establish your initial download, the initial login handshake. God forbid you're using 2FA. It's, I mean, three people to work on a package like OpenSSL. So first off, don't convince yourself that you don't need to get involved because, they've got enough people. You know, Fedora, CentOS, these are top-of-the-line projects. They don't need my help. Baloney. They need help. Trust me. People want to take vacations. People have, God forbid, other hobbies like sewing penguin pillows. They want time off and they want help and they need new blood, new ideas, new effort. So definitely sign up. Second of all, Noah, the thing that I also noticed Amy mentions with the mention of documentation, and it's sad that even after, gosh, I've been in this space for 10 years, Noah, you were in the space, five, six, seven years before I even came around, was that open source development isn't just coders. You don't have to understand. You don't have to be able to read the matrix, pun intended, to be able to contribute to open source. There is always a need for developers. There is always a need for the next kernel engineer to come up with some crazy subsystem for Linux. Yes, all those things are true, but there's so much that goes around it. And I won't tell the full story here, but the short version is, I actually got involved in the Fedora podcast because I was like, hey, I see you have a podcast. And I see it's been a while since you've had a last episode. So if the current podcast host ever needs some time off or wants a co-host, I'm more than happy to volunteer. Short version is, within about two weeks, the Fedora Project podcast was my baby. Not just volunteering every now and then. No, the whole thing, the whole pipeline was my baby. So be careful what you volunteer for.

Noah Chelliah: Amy, I got a question for you. Eric just reminded me of something or clued me onto something. Would you say it's an accurate summation to see that in some ways, people who maybe are a little concerned about their own technical competence might be the best people to write technical documentation because that documentation should, if it's written well, presume no prior knowledge?

Amy Marrich: Yeah, I mean, how I originally got started in OpenStack was installing it. So when you're installing it, you're going through all the documentation, making sure all the configuration works. And that's why I say being new sometimes gives you a set of eyes that, you know, when you're so familiar with it, you skip steps because you know what you're doing. So, yes. And that's why I always say start with docs, because while you're running through that, you're also doing manual QA. You know, you run into something, you ask a question on a channel or you open a bug and you start having conversations with people. And that's a great way to get started. Every time you go on a channel and say, hey, I was running through the docs and I found this, this, and this, this error message is not what I was expecting, you're also earning trust. And how to move up in a community and take bigger roles is also by earning trust, becoming what we call a maintainer, what we call an OpenStack, a core reviewer. You earn trust by answering questions reviewing code reviewing code is another great place i don't consider myself a developer but i can read code and i read it quickly but if you give me a blank page i'm going to sit there for five hours and i am going to over-engineer it But being able to run a meeting doing other things that are within your comfort level earns you trust. And as you earn trust, you take on more and more and your community appreciates you more and more. So yes, not knowing what you're doing and going through and reading the code, asking questions about the code, reading the documentation, asking questions about the documentation. Hey, I noticed we went from this file over here and then we added this line and then we're going over here. Is there a reason for it? And someone might go, oh, well, we forgot this step in the documentation or we, you know, you release coding because documentation tends to be trailing. Well, we released the code and we forgot to update the new documentation. You know, so all those things come out and all those things are important in an open source community. And that happens in every community.

Noah Chelliah: Anything else about getting people involved or if there are newcomers or people that want to meet and greet, are there any events that go on centered around CentOS? No pun intended.

Shaun McCance: Sure. Our major core contributor event is called CentOS Connect. And it happens as part of the FOSDEM fringe every year. so we're right now negotiating with the venue and you know all the boring stuff but that that'll be you know look out for the announcement of that you know with FOSDEM up FOSDEM happens in early February or late January in Brussels there are a lot of ancillary events that happen around FOSDEM and we're one of them so we're on the the Thursday and Friday before FOSDEM and we have like a day and a half of presentations and then a half day of team meetups and workshops. And it's a really big hallway track event. So if you're interested in this space and CentOS, or even Fedora, there's a lot of Fedorans that show up. If you are someone who goes to FOSDEM, I think it's definitely worth coming in two days early for that. I understand not everybody's going to fly to Brussels in February with me. So you can find us at some other events. We will have a booth at DevConf US in Boston next month. Amy and I will both be there. I think that's a great event. I believe we'll also have a smaller booth at All Things Open in Raleigh in October. One place that we do consistently have a big presence is SCaLE. And Amy mentioned there was the Fedora Hatch event that we kind of co-located at SCaLE this year. And I think we're looking at doing that again, maybe expanding it. So I think that's a wonderful event for learning to get involved, becoming a new contributor. And then, of course, we have a booth at SCaLE as well. And you can come talk to just a lot of CentOS and Fedora developers show up there. That that hatch format is something that we would really like to roll out to to some other events there are a lot of other kind of regional events FrOSCon was very recent i think in germany linux days in prague these are both places that a lot of contributors show up to so we'd like people to roll out this this hatch format to to to bring in new contributors at at other events but obviously i can't attend every event i'm That's funny.

Amy Marrich: Texas Linux Fest.

Troy Dawson: Oh, thank you, Amy.

Shaun McCance: Sorry, I forgot that.

Amy Marrich: Texas Linux Fest, first weekend of November on Friday and Saturday. Workshops on Friday and talks on Saturday. And I can tell you there will be some CentOS talks on Saturday. And then we're planning on having a booth there as well.

Troy Dawson: I'll be there too.

Amy Marrich: Sweet.

Troy Dawson: With all my shirts.

Eric Hendricks: I too plan on being at Texas Linux Fest. It'll be a big, big old reunion.

Shaun McCance: Excellent.

Eric Hendricks: Awesome. Well, I picked this up from a fellow podcaster, and I stole it, and I don't attribute it, so I forget who I stole this from. But I want to kind of go around the horn real quick as we wrap up our episode and ask each of you if there's anything we didn't cover that you were hoping to speak to.

Troy Dawson: Try it out. If you're intimidated by RHEL or one of these enterprise things, hey, one of these live things is an easy way to try it out and see it. I think the question of who should use it is a good one. And the question is, try it. And it might be you.

Eric Hendricks: To be fair, so our listeners probably has heard that I've been rebuilding my home lab the last few months, and I almost went with CentOS Stream. Almost. But I decided to go a little crazy and went with Fedora server bootc images. So my systems reboot every night, almost.

Troy Dawson: Pretty soon you might be able to do that with the CentOS Stream ones.

Eric Hendricks: There you go. I'll have a decision to make then. Although I've been Fedora podcast host for a few years off and on, so I'm pretty set in my ways for using Fedora server in my home lab. But I don't know. With some bribery, Troy, you might be able to get me to run CentOS Stream.

Troy Dawson: I can't give you a shirt. They're too expensive.

Eric Hendricks: Oh, dread. I tried. I tried. Well, folks, that brings us to the bottom of our episode. Really excited that you all joined us. Thank you, Shaun, Amy, Troy. this was probably the biggest Fedora podcast panel that we've ever had. So really appreciate each of you giving up time at the end of a Monday evening as we record here. So really thankful to each of you for joining us. Thank you for having us. For sure, for sure. Love it. With that said, I think our next episode, we're going to be talking about Project Hummingbird, which is something big that Red Hat and some of the surrounding open source communities are very, very interested in. So if you've been around the neighborhood, as it were, You might have heard mention of Hummingbird. We're going to be talking to Jorge Castro, who's been on the show before, and Scott McCarty, who is part of the RHEL BU. We'll be talking about Project Hummingbird. So if you're curious about what that is, definitely tune in two weeks from the release of this episode. And as I mentioned, we're bringing Shaun back. We're going to be talking about the Fedora community a little bit here in a couple of episodes. And we've got quite a few other episodes in the backlog. Guests lined up. A lot of exciting things to talk about. And of course, we'll have the next version of Fedora Linux coming up before too much longer. But Noah, did I miss anything?

Noah Chelliah: I think we got it. We'll see them right back here. Same bat place, same bat channel.

Eric Hendricks: And most of our audience is probably too young to get that reference. But I got it. I don't have to go watch Batman. I got it. Well, folks, on behalf of all of our guests today and on behalf of my co-host, Noah Chelliah, thank you all for joining us. Make sure to check out the show notes. And if you would, please go leave a review wherever you get your podcasts from. This audience is growing. You all are amazing. But there's still one more person out there probably that hasn't heard the Fedora podcast yet. So definitely go leave us a review. Until next time, really appreciate you all tuning in. And we'll see you all again real soon.