It’s just got growing pains.
It’s not that the aims are to create another Debian, or even that its to have the size and scope of it (i.e. Fedora doesn’t aim to run on as many architectures as Debian does, not in this early stage at least, till the volunteer base builds up).
A good summary of the issues are even now on LWN, but icon really did portray whats going on. We (the OSS community) know there’s a lack of communication – this can be fixed. We know Red Hat is interested in fixing the Fedora Project – they talked about it at their world wide conference.
Think about it, companies just don’t just open source their babies overnight. It takes time. Patience is a virtue, but normally, patience comes when good communication exists, so we’re back again to lacking communication with the outside world (i.e. those not @redhat.com). The recent outbreak at fedora-devel-list exists because of lack of communication – read soon & eventually from the participate page, as thats an attempt at some communication.
So, stop and think for a moment. You want CVS access? Surely RH can’t give you access to the build system (lest you screw up RHEL, their new RH Desktop, etc…). We want rh_sales to stop bagging Fedora – we need our own “sales team”, and definitely we need to make sure that whatever brainwashing rh_sales goes thru removes such thoughts. And yes, we’re always going to have to deal with rh_legal, because this is a project “sponsored by RH” – maybe a public forum for some of the legal blokes to hang out at (fedora-legal mailing list?).
Things are slow, but patience always means good things happen eventually. Wait for the next Fedora News Updates, there’ll be some interesting scoop there :)