# EPEL Interview Show Notes - Fedora Podcast ## Questions for the listeners *These questions are ones that are probably easy to answer or more for the listeners who may not be familiar with EPEL.* What is EPEL? How does EPEL fit into the RHEL ecosystem? How many users are there of EPEL? Is EPEL just the rest of what's in the Fedora repos that is not selected to ship with RHEL? Is there a difference between what's available for Fedora vs CentOS? Is packaging for EPEL different that packaging for other distros? I don't imagine this is the case. ## Actual questions I have *These are questions that I don't know the answers to and hopefully add something to any discussion that's been had.* What are some of the enterprise-specific programs that are in EPEL? What are some of the most popular EPEL packages? What are some of the most important EPEL packages that users depend on? How can contributors help maintain packages? Can they choose what package they maintain? What are the responsibilities involved? What is the time investment like? What kind of skills do they need to know before trying to maintain a package? How many packages can a full-time employee maintain? If a package already has a maintainer, how can someone still help for that package? Is there basically nothing else to do at that point and they should consider maintaining another package in a 'I scratch your back and you scratch mine' mindset? Why would a company pay an employee to maintain packages for free software? Is there resistance from different areas in the enterprise when they hear of IT using FOSS? How big a role if any does that play in getting buy-in for dedicated resources? Who are the decision makers that would be involved in integrating EPEL and FOSS contributions into job descriptions? What hesitations might those folks have about moving in this direction?