What looked like a done deal for Fedora is now very much on hold. The Fedora AI Developer Desktop Initiative, a proposal to build an official platform for AI and machine learning workloads on Fedora, has been blocked after two Fedora Council members retracted their earlier approval votes.The initiative was proposed by Red Hat engineer Gordon Messmer, aiming to deliver an Atomic Desktop with accelerated AI workload support, covering developer tools, hardware enablement, and building a community around AI on Fedora.Why the withdrawal?As you already know, at the May 6 council meeting, the members unanimously voted to approve this new initiative. After which a short, lazy consensus window was left open until May 8 to accommodate absent members, after which the decision was to be ratified.But that last bit never happened, as council member Justin Wheeler (Jflory7) was the first person to change their vote to -1. He pointed to the LTS kernel component of the proposal as a "massive structural shift" that had not been cleared with the relevant legal and engineering parties.He also noted that feedback from Fedora kernel subject-matter experts had not been properly incorporated into the plan and that new developments, particularly the Nova driver work (for NVIDIA GPUs), would introduce technical and legal complexities that need proper vetting.Following that, fellow council member Miro Hrončok (churchyard) put in his -1, saying that he had originally assumed the proposal was purely additive and therefore uncontroversial.But seeing the community's response, he realized that he was mistaken about that. As an elected representative, he felt the need to reflect on this major proposal before signing it off.A community dividedOver 180 replies have piled up in the proposal's discussion thread, with many well-known Fedora contributors pushing back on things like kernel policy, proprietary software, and project identity.Hans de Goede from the packaging team called out the proposal's emphasis on CUDA support as going against Fedora's foundational commitment to free software, arguing that open alternatives like AMD's ROCm and Intel's oneAPI should be the focus instead.Another Fedora contributor, Tim Flink, questioned whether the initiative amounted to little more than a mechanism to get CUDA onto a Fedora-adjacent system.Neal Gompa raised similar concerns, saying Fedora has historically leveraged its stance on proprietary software to push vendors toward open solutions and that this proposal would undercut that effort.What happens next?Part of what made this blow up the way it did was a communications gap. Fabio Valentini of the FESCo noted that he only became aware the proposal was being voted on after stumbling across the council meeting on Matrix accidentally.The initiative is now listed as blocked in the council ticket, with a new escalation deadline of May 22. Gordon (the proposal submitter) has said a revised draft is coming, telling the thread he plans to have a few people look it over before posting it.