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hpr_transcripts/hpr0402.txt

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+Episode: 402
+Title: HPR0402: Interview with Paul Frields of the Fedora Project
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0402/hpr0402.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:50:53
+
+---
+
+.
+.
+Paul Freild's from what's your official title?
+Fedora Project Leader.
+Fedora Project Leader.
+I know you actually work for Red Hat.
+Okay.
+Alright.
+And actually sitting here talking to you, I see that on your desk, you have a Red Hat.
+An actual Red Hat.
+Yeah.
+So, one of the things that happens when you begin working for Red Hat besides the
+brutal hazing is that they hit you with the sticks, but the thing that you get at the
+end of the tunnel is the Red Hat, the Red Fedora.
+But I don't know if I should be making this confession here, but I actually have three
+of them.
+That particular hat that you're looking at is one that was sent to me by a friend back
+when I was a volunteer of the door contributor.
+I had been working on documentation for a few years at that point, and I don't want
+to overstate my part in the team, but I think I was like one of the key people.
+I mean, I would consistently come in and do work, and I really enjoyed it.
+We have done a, I think one or two sets of release notes for Fedora at that point.
+That may have been around, I want to say it was around Fedora Core 5 back when we had
+the core.
+And I think they're five or six, and he sent me that hat.
+And interestingly, it's the only hat that I have that actually fits me, because I have
+an enormous head, and my wife will tell you that for nothing, but I have a big head.
+I try not to have a big head.
+And if we're speaking, we've got a lot of, I'm not, you know, in the face of head.
+Well, I think it's so comforts, because I mean, that's like an extra large hat.
+And I mean, it just fits.
+And I've got a couple others.
+The one that Red Hat gave me when I was hired was large, so they apparently didn't know
+that I had such a weld you got it.
+They didn't know it that way, but you know, that's how I got the job, I skunked them.
+Yeah.
+Cool.
+And it's actually a Fedora, right?
+It is.
+It is actually a Fedora.
+So the official Red Hat is, I didn't really actually know that.
+I didn't know the official, I mean, I saw that, I mean, obviously the logo has it.
+I guess I didn't identify that as a Fedora.
+Yeah.
+The great thing about it is, I mean, you know that our name, the Fedora project's name came
+originally from Fedora.us, which was run by a student, then I think he was a grad student
+CS at University of Hawaii, by the name of Warren Tagami, and he started Fedora, US, as basically
+a way of making add-on RPM packages for Red Hat Linux, which back then was a, you know,
+a boxed product you go buy in a store, 40 bucks, yeah.
+So he would, you know, he actually got some folks together to package up things that,
+you know, Red Hat wasn't interested in doing for whatever reason, and so they had this
+Fedora.us repository, so even back then they had, you know, as places you get those
+RPMs, just, you know, download them and add them to your system.
+I had no idea.
+I didn't know this backstory.
+Yeah.
+And so the reason they, well, so they called it Fedora because it was a way, obviously,
+they couldn't use Red Hat's framework, yeah.
+I mean, you know, just like you wouldn't, you know, make a store selling like, you know,
+things to add to your iPod and call it, you know, Apple add-on.
+They're right.
+You know, they get a little upset.
+So you know, Fedora was a play on words because of this, you know, this red Fedora that
+the Shadow Man War, right, little Shadow Man logo.
+So Fedora.us eventually merged with Red Hat's original Red Hat Linux project, which was
+where they had tried to sort of turn their Red Hat Linux product into a community.
+Yeah.
+Okay.
+It didn't work really well, but what they realized is that what they were missing is, you
+know, some piece of the piece of community and infrastructure that Warren had.
+So, you know, when they put them together, that's what became the Fedora project.
+Well, actually, that brings up another question, and I hope I'm not re-trading too much
+of other interviews that you've done, but when did you come to Linux in general?
+No.
+Actually, no.
+That's a good question, actually.
+I haven't had a whole lot of people asked.
+You know, when you've, you know, happened to land in a job like this, like I did, you know,
+people just assume that you've been doing it your whole life.
+And I'm not, you know, I'm not probably as long-time a Linux user as some of the people
+that I've met.
+I started using Linux in, it was around the beginning of 1997, or the end of 1996, beginning
+of 1997.
+And I actually worked in a, a criminal laboratory, like forensic laboratory, and we were processing
+digital media.
+So, you know, if there were cases involving, you know, this kind of crime, that kind of crime,
+there was some sort of computer media involved, involved our laboratory process, that stuff.
+And at the time, we were paying an enormous amount of money for proprietary tools, things
+like, you know, an application that would allow you to boot off a DOS boot disk, do a 16-bit
+and single user environment, and then copy one disk completely, and add the hard disk
+completely.
+Yeah.
+Like a DD.
+Yeah.
+So, you just hit the magical point where I started using Linux and discovered the DD command
+after, you know, a month or two of playing with it.
+You know, friend who came in the office was a salarist guy, and he, he plopped a book on
+my desk one day and said, this is Linux, I think it's going to be really big, and you
+ought to, I think, I had been bothering him about, like, trying to teach me some Unix stuff.
+Yeah.
+And, you know, the sun work station he worked on, which was fascinating.
+That's cool.
+And he plopped this book on my desk and he's like, you're going to want to learn this.
+I think it's going to be big.
+And so, you know, that red hat Linux 4.1, I started on that, and, you know, I discovered
+the DD command.
+I'm like, we are spending just made everything up to $1,000 on all this software, and we
+don't have to look at this, you know, and I started showing people the light more or
+less.
+I said, and more or more, you did you know while you're copying that disk, you can actually
+be filling out your notes or, you know, doing other work on our system, you don't have
+to, you know, your system doesn't have to be a brick, because it's, you know, oh, I'm
+busy copying other stuff.
+Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
+Don't bother me.
+Right, essentially, we had these long desks of hardware, and if you started running
+one of these copies, which, of course, we did a lot, the system was, I mean, that was
+it.
+It was tied up.
+So, we had to have more workstations, you could possibly believe.
+I mean, you had to have a license for each workstation.
+Yeah, absolutely.
+Yeah, absolutely.
+And their uptime wasn't even necessarily complete, because it was more like, if you had
+that many drives to copy, then you were using all the workstations you didn't, you weren't,
+so they were sitting around.
+Right.
+I mean, there were times where you'd actually run out where you literally say, I can't
+work today, at least I can't do any computer-based work, you know, I can go fill in some paperwork
+in there.
+Right.
+But, you know, what happened is a lot of people would schedule the stuff, you know, they
+would basically set everything in the last half hour where they went home, at least on
+their last station, so that they'd be able to work through the day.
+I mean, it was just looking back, it just seems ridiculous, how we did business that way.
+So, well, anyway, the long short of the story is actually the long, I guess, we're really
+not doing a short version, but the, to make a long story longer, I basically took that
+as, like, the harbinger for the rest of my career, and I spent the next few years writing
+forensic protocols for Unix Evidence and teaching all of our various forensic people out in
+the field nationwide, how to use Linux, and we based everything on Red Hat, and I tried
+a few other districts, but I always came back to Red Hat because it was, it was easier
+to install than anything out there, and it had this great documentation back in, you know,
+it had a good company behind it, and, you know, honestly, as I looked more into it, and
+I started to care more about the ethics of free software, I looked at what the company
+did, you know, that they actually really put their money where their mouth is, they were
+just an open source company through and through, and I was really impressed by that, and
+so I, you know, I stuck with them, and, you know, I'm not too big to admit that, you
+know, I, I, you know, had these sort of dreams one day of coming to Red Hat, and, you know,
+Max B, that called me one day, and, and said that, you know, he was looking to move on
+and do something else at Red Hat, and, was I interested in taking his job, so it was,
+it was a, it was a good day, it was, it was a, it was a hard decision because I had a,
+you know, a really good job, was, you know, things were going very well, stable, my family
+was happy, and, you know, it was a little bit of a, a little bit of a, you know, a fear
+situation, some people didn't feel the unknown, and I thought, you know what, life is just
+too short.
+Yeah, exactly.
+Just too short, you've got to take the chance when it comes along, especially if it's
+something that you really care about with you, obviously, when you're doing Fedora documentation
+every spare moment you have, and you're, you're, your hobby time anyway, then obviously
+you care about it.
+Yeah, absolutely.
+I mean, it was a way, basically, to spend more time doing what I'm doing.
+You wanted to do it.
+Yeah, exactly.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+And so it was, it was a, a very excellent time in my life.
+I feel, I look back on it and say, at least, you know, for whatever else may happen, I can
+look back on that and say, you know, I'm not going to have any regrets about it.
+Yes.
+So then I think, you know, people should, you know, should look at their lives and, you
+know, you don't want to look back and regret not having done something.
+Right.
+So the adoption of Linux at that old job, the adoption of Linux was pretty quick there,
+would you say, like the, the four-in-six lab?
+It was, it was over the period of, I would say, a couple years and, you know, the reason
+being is that there was some entrenched technology there.
+It was all proprietary and they were, you know, you know, paying out a notice for it recently.
+And when, you know, when I showed them basically that they didn't have to pay a contract
+or a huge amount of money to build these, you know, pipelines to have incredibly automated
+processes, I mean, it did shake things up a little.
+I feel like, you know, it was, it was more, it was more, I think, that the people who
+really understood what they were doing, understood the nature of scientific methodology and by
+that, I guess, I mean, you know, repeatability that you have some sort of, you have the notion
+of being able to take the tools that you use and present them in a court of law.
+You can show open source code directly to a court.
+You can give it to the defense attorney or defense contractors or whatever and they can,
+you know, take that code and do the exact same tests that you did.
+Right.
+It's 100% repeatable and it's, and the transparency is what makes it so powerful.
+It's not something that, you know, we, this laboratory, sort of built in a black box.
+And you can't look at your code.
+Yeah, I know you're talking about Jeremy Allison says a lot of the same stuff about the advantages,
+at least in the legal area of open source because there's no risk that the code is tainted
+because you can look at the code.
+Right.
+Right.
+I mean, there's the way that we could drill down into it basically made it, I mean, essential
+as a no-brainer.
+So people who, again, they understood that scientific methodology and they understood the underpinnings
+forensic science in, you know, in the legal sense and, you know, in the, I think, in the
+ethical sense of being able to, you know, have this very transparent box that you do what
+you're working.
+They were very quick to embrace it, I would say.
+And over the next couple of years, you know, as people started learning more about it and
+they realized how easy it could be.
+Yes, you had to go to a command line and run some commands, but we were already doing that
+anyway.
+Yeah.
+The people who were doing this work were not.
+They weren't Windows Point and Click junkies, you know, a lot of them understood how to do
+things in a community.
+Yeah, right.
+Yeah.
+And so it was very, very interesting that the fact that we had taken the help of the commodity
+hardware.
+Yeah.
+That we had so much of and actually have a much, much greater return on investment for that
+same hardware.
+Well, Red Hat just recently, and you might not have, I don't know if you're able to comment
+on this or not, but Red Hat posted on their official blog.
+I think it was a video about open source in government.
+Did you see this video?
+Oh, is this pretty new?
+It's really new.
+Okay.
+I may have missed it.
+I've had, because I'm literally coming here like almost back to back after another conference.
+Okay.
+And I've been, I've been a little, well, I've been deprived.
+Yeah.
+Because it's really cool.
+It is Red Hat saying that, you know, government institutions shouldn't be throwing their money
+at something that doesn't belong to the public when the government belongs, ideally, to the
+public.
+You know, and that is, if the government is truly going to serve the people, and I might
+be adding some of my own apolitical beliefs here, but essentially they're saying that if
+the government is going to be owned by the people, then the software that the government
+uses needs to be owned by the public.
+Right.
+So it's not Microsoft.
+Absolutely.
+And, you know, and I can't agree enough, you know, especially there have been, you know,
+we've had many years now of discussion about open source in, for example, voting system.
+Yeah.
+I mean, that's a pretty old argument at this point, and I don't think that there's anyone
+whose opinion is respectable, who believes that proprietary technology is running the underpinnings
+of our democracy.
+This is a good thing.
+Right.
+You know, I'm frankly horrified by that idea, and there have been enough, you know, there
+have been enough examples of people doing penetration testing and scientific testing, and, you
+know, there have been enough instances where the efficacy and the reliability of those sorts
+of systems has been called into question, but I think that, you know, no citizen of the
+United States ought to be thinking that a proprietary voting technology is something
+we ought to put any stock in whatsoever.
+I think it's, you know, again, I'd say that's another, it's another no-brainer.
+You know, I haven't seen the video, and, you know, just speaking as a, you know, just
+a person who works with open source all day, I mean, I absolutely would like to see more
+of it in government.
+And I'll tell you, you know, one of the major problems that I've seen in government, you
+know, and I was, you know, as government employee for almost, almost 20 years, the thing that
+I saw often is the government getting charged over and over for essentially the same basic
+building blocks, all of which are readily available, yeah, consumable in open source.
+I mean, right?
+Open source is about, and I don't, I'll paraphrase, I guess, what Greg DeConexberg, a good friend
+of mine, says, you know, it's always a good idea to steal from Greg because he's a smart
+guy and, and he talks real pretty.
+And so one of the things I heard him say recently was that there are so many people in government
+who are doing work that is very specialized and very, requires a very deep corpus of knowledge,
+right?
+And those people are some of the best in the world at what they do.
+And you can look all, I mean, people can make jokes about the government, you know, and
+government employees, and that's fine.
+I mean, there's, I'm sure that there's, you know, wide swaths of employees all over,
+you know, all over the private and public sectors that, you know, you can do that.
+And I believe that there are areas in government where you've got incredibly, incredibly brilliant
+people who know a lot about a very specialized area.
+And it does not make sense for those people to be paying over and over again for basic
+building blocks of solutions, right?
+When essentially, if you put those building blocks in front of them, I mean, what they really
+need is they need Legos, yeah, they have what it takes to put the Legos together into something
+that is a, you know, an amazing contraption that is going to be very well suited to solve
+their particular problem.
+But instead, you know, there's this culture that's grown up over many years.
+There's this, you know, this, you know, I don't know what you call it, I like to think
+of it as sort of a, you know, this blood sucking middle level of IT consultants that are essentially
+just leaching resources out of the government constantly.
+You know, I think that there's, there, there is a, there is a very respectable and commendable
+move nowadays towards, you know, more transparency in government.
+And I think that that should carry over into the systems that government uses.
+There, you know, there, we have some interesting, some very interesting fingers and various
+pies.
+And when I say we not red hat, I mean, actually, some of the folks who are working in
+the Fedora project, who've got some tools that we are making available and, and demoing
+in a couple of places to try and show how government data can be made more available,
+readily consumable, and available near real time to citizens everywhere.
+So, you know, people will essentially be able to build, you know, mashups of government
+data on, you know, on an accelerated basis.
+Yeah, well, that's really cool.
+Thank you for listening to HACC Republic Radio.
+HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of her team.