Kevin P. Fleming

Submitted by kfleming on Wed, 2022-03-02 18:52
Pronouns: 
He/Him/His
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Description of the candidate: 

Kevin P. Fleming has 30+ years of programming experience, with almost every major programming language. Industry experience includes traditional client/server database applications, open source messaging and networking, and mainframe operating systems. Kevin's primary skill is producing solutions that use resources effectively through problem analysis and solution design. Kevin joined Red Hat in January of 2022 to support the creation and delivery of Red Hat’s software products, which are entirely based on open source software. Prior to that he was the open source and open technology community coordinator at Bloomberg. His responsibilities included Bloomberg’s collaboration with the open source community, ensuring that Bloomberg’s engineering team could contribute innovations and advances in a wide variety of projects and technical domains.

I would like to re-envision the Incubator Project program, to encourage more projects to join the OSI's umbrella, and to provide a well-planned and organized path for those projects to exit incubation and become full-fledged members of the OSI community.

I have passion for the combination of 'community' and 'open source' and I want to leverage my talents to help the OSI community grow and increase in relevance. I've supported a number of large open source communities wearing my 'work' hat at various times, but I think I can achieve similar results wearing my 'personal' hat as a member of the OSI's board of directors.

Type of seat: 
Individual

Comments

Submitted by nwillis on Wed, 2022-03-16 10:59

Hello, I have a small set questions ....

(1) What's the nature of your role at Red Hat? What products do you work on; are you in engineering, legal, sales, etc? "Supporting" products could mean almost anything; this question is seeking clarification for the details of your connection to open-source software.

(2) You also note in your comments that you just joined Red Hat in January. Is that enough time to have settled into your role, and be certain that you (a) have the time required to serve as an OSI director and (b) know how serving as an OSI director will and won't interact with your job requirements?

(3) On a tangentially related note, there are two Red Hat employees running for a seat in this election. Did the two of you coordinate your decisions to campaign? Is it appropriate for a single vendor to take multiple seats on a board of eight elected members?

(4) Again, an offshoot of the preceding question. Do you see an Individual board seat as an obligation to represent the voice and priorities of the voters? Or, if elected, will you represent Red Hat's interests?

(5) Regarding the "contribution" section, what do you mean by advocating for projects to "join the OSI's umbrella"? Presumably this means working groups (although please feel free to elaborate if not) rather than, say, code/resource hosting; are you referring to existing, outside projects you would like to see OSI annex? If so, which ones?

Submitted by kfleming on Thu, 2022-03-17 07:27

Thanks for the great questions! I'll answer them in order: 1) I am a program manager on the RHEL team, responsible for managing the creation and delivery of RHEL releases. This role is a mixture, as it involves 'business' side things like requirements gathering, building of schedules, collaboration with product managers, but also technical work. It does not involve direct interaction with open source communities, though. I have done that for many years on a personal basis, and in my previous jobs, and will continue to have some small direct interaction as part of my job as I help to improve open source tools that we use. My personal interaction with open source projects has actually increased since I changed jobs, which I greatly enjoy! 2) My candidacy for the OSI board is unrelated to my job, and I don't expect there to be any time pressures or other interactions to be concerned about. 3) There was no coordination of our candidacies. I have submitted myself for consideration at least once before, but had not done so in the last couple of years due to various factors; this year i was strongly encouraged by some people in the open source world to consider submitting again. As noted in the answer for question number 2, my candidacy is unrelated to my role at Red Hat. 4) I see membership in the board to be an obligation to represent the interests of the OSI's members and the broader open source software community, without regard for the employment status or other affiliations of any of the board members. 5) I was referring somewhat obliquely to the ClearlyDefined project, which is in a sort of 'limbo' state as an OSI member project since there was never a defined process or milestones which could be used to help the project move from entry through incubation to being a full-fledged member project. In addition to ClearlyDefined, there are groups who have been working to create open-access software vulnerability databases, open-access dependency-graph databases, and other sorts of 'metadata' about the global open source software community. I'd like to find a way for those projects to also have a home in the OSI, if a suitable process can be built for that.

To promote and protect open source software and communities...

For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit, the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition (OSD), and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.