Slashdot Mirror
Revealed: How Fedora And The Community Interact
bakwas_internet writes "Konstantin Ryabitsev sent a funny
message in form of a irc chat log, revealing how Fedora and the Community Interact, to the development discussions mailing list related to Fedora Core.The story also appeared at lwn.net
and OSnews."
The comments made about Redhat can be applied to many company supported projects. Now that is scary. It takes a lot more time to be "trusted" by a company than Open Source projects not run by companies. Funny, sad and scary.
We chase away enthusiastic supporters that can really help by not having a process which they can follow to get real access to these systems and make a difference.
Okay, only mark your diaries if you are Fedora inclined like me ;)
Fedora Core 2, if on schedule (which, AFAIK it still is) is due to be available from mirrors on the 17th of this month.
The actual distibution is sceduled to start going out to the mirrors on the 14th but I think the mirrors will be requested to keep it locked till the 17th.
If they don't make it to the release deadline it may lead to some IRC antics rather like the ones mentioned in the article.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Great demonstration of the relationship. For real hilarious excerpts from IRC, try http://www.bash.org
(Warning: Some quotes may contain questionable content.)
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
I really think their quality is improving. FC2 test3 is a nice system, and I think adequately simplified for most home users. It's great that they're almost right on the edge of the major stuff (KDE, kernel, GNOME, X, etc), most distributions seem to lag pretty heavily. In additon, the access to ISOs has been pretty spectacular, not something I could say for RH8, RH9.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
The fedora test list is very much a bug reporting list. Mainly heaps of uers chime in and beeyatch about how some feature doesn't work or how some hardware isn't supported. Then it is expected that whoever is listening does something.
I doubt most of the regulars actually do any coding.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Actually, what else could a software company want? Think about it, they're basically developing a product that has features that will eventually be sold to generate revenue. But the best part (for redhat anyway) is that they have a huge and completely free testing and bug-fixing population. What a deal.
Score +5
Insitful 70%
Funny 30%
In all seriousness, although the article had a humerous slant, it was true in all the important ways. Redhat really fumbled with the whole fedora thing, and I think this is opening up the way for other distrobutions
I have since migrated to other distrobutions and realize how much I was missting (gentoo level 1 install on the servers, SuSE on the desktop).
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.
What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code.
It's simple economics: where's the money in it? "User loyalty," you say. Really? Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.
It seems to me that Red Hat is just looking out for number 1 by not spending huge amounts of time with non-paying users; even when those users have valid input, the time involved in building a trusted developer base makes it prohibitive.
Comments?
-Ed
Web Design & Software Development
If you want quality content, you need to be a subscribe... Otherwise, the community version of slashdot will EAT YOUR BRANE.
I like to believe these things happen by magic.
Satirical pieces on the infighting merely detracts from the mystery!
It eaats your branes!
--
Topic in #os: hey guyz, stop pickin on irix. /msg atnt haha. idiot. :~(
<SCO> w00t! i bought unix! im gonna b so rich!
<novell>
<novell> whoops. was that out loud?
<atnt> rotfl
<ibm> lol
<SCO> why r u laffin at me?
<novell> dude, unix is so 10 years ago. linux is in now.
<SCO> wtf?
<SCO> hey guyz, i bought caldera, I have linux now.
<red_hat> haha, your linux sucks.
<novell> lol
<atnt> lol
<ibm> lol
<SCO> no wayz, i will sell more linux than u!
<ibm> your linux sucks, you should look at SuSE
<SuSE> Ja. Wir bilden gutes Linux f? IBM.
<SCO> can we do linux with you?
<SuSE> Ich bin nicht sicher...
<ibm> *cough*
<SuSE> Gut lassen Sie uns vereinigen.
* SuSE is now SuSE[UL]
* SCO is now caldera[UL]
<turbolinux> can we play?
<conectiva> we're bored... we'll go too.
<ibm> sure!
* turbolinux is now turbolinux[UL]
* conectiva is now conectiva[UL]
<ibm> redhat: you should join!
<SuSE[UL]> Ja! Wir sind vereinigtes Linux. Widerstand ist vergeblich.
<red_hat> haha. no.
<red_hat> lamers.
<ibm> what about you debian?
<debian> we'll discuss it and let you know in 5 years.
<caldera[UL]> no one wants my linux!
<turbolinux[UL]> i got owned.
<caldera[UL]> u all tricked me. linux is lame.
* caldera[UL] is now known as SCO
<SCO> i'm going back to unix.
<SGI> yeah! want to do unix with me?
<SCO> haha. no. lamer.
<novell> lol
<ibm> snap!
<SGI>
<SCO> hey, u shut up. im gonna sue u ibm.
<ibm> wtf?
<SCO> yea, you stole all the good stuff from unix.
<red_hat> lol
<SuSE[UL]> heraus laut lachen
<ibm> lol
<SCO> shutup. i'm gonna email all your friends and tell them you suck.
<ibm> go ahead. baby.
<SCO> andandand... i revoke your unix! how do you like that?
<ibm> oh no, you didn't. AIX is forever.
<novell> actually, we still own unix, you can't do that.
<SCO> wtf? we bought it from u.
<novell> whoops. our bad.
<SCO> i own u. haha
<SCO> ibm: give me all your AIX now!
<ibm> whatever. lamer.
* ibm sets mode +b SCO!*@*
* SCO has been kicked from #os (own this.)
I do wish they would put the FC2 stuff on an apt-for-rpm server, as they did with the FC1 stuff.
I really like the combination of Synaptic, apt-for-RPM, and Fedora, but as yet I've not seen any of the FC2 stuff avaiable via apt (yum yes, apt no).
The combination of the meta-data fetching of apt, the transaction rollback of RPM, and the avaiability of UIs like Synaptic is really great for system admin.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Who the hell modded this funny?
A) The damn guy coppied and pasted it wrong. If you read the actual article, you'll see he reversed oss_crowd with rh_dev, which completely destroys the whole intention of the satire.
B) He just copied and pasted (wrongly) something from the article, with no additional input of his own! I'm not saying he's trolling, or creating flamebait, but come on! Maybe if he'd copied/pasted it correctly, and then added some of his own lines, a Funny moderation would be justified, but there's not a single word of his own authorship!
Please, mods, use some discression (and read the articles AND the comments you're moderating). Thanks.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
some distros suck more; the paradoxical think is that none of them suck less.
i am probably going to use fedora because it has a stable release schedule. that doesn't mean it sucks any less; but other distros suck more. what it really means that means if someone asks me what i am running i can say "fedora core 2" and that means something. that means if i have issues with some software the guy who got my email reporting whatever bug knows what i've got and can see if my problem can be replicated.
try that on debian. debian has no coherent release schedule, and at this point it's not even clear they are EVER going to have another release: the current "release" has been delayed *years* already, and debian users are quite pleased with that. debian users just incrementally apt-get upgrade "unstable" and claim that is OK.
but try figuring out how to file a bug based on that--what exactly is debian unstable? it's a huge moving target, it really doesn't mean anything, and by the time the guy gets around to looking at my bug it's likely radically different. debian needs to get its shit together and get back to 3-4 month releases. apt-get upgrade is really not the answer. i also like rhat's "best of breed" philosophy versus debians "here have everything" philosophy: i don't want to choose most of the time; and when i DO want to choose i probably know what i'm doing well enough to manually install. so most of the time, i want the distro to choose for me.
so where does that leave me? i've got a rh9 that is end of life and i reall don't want to switch to the debian chaos. i'm hoping to go fedora, but you guys say it sucks. enterprise is no good for my home box, it's not worth paying an "enterprise" license for home.
so, here is a plea: make fedora core not suck more than other distros. i don't need support from redhat for my home system; i do need stable planned releases. and guess what? whatever i use at home is likely going to determine what we pay for at work, so it's not like there isn't a business interest here in making me happy. if i do get forced onto debian at home, it's only a matter of time before i advocate for it at work as well.
Color HTML-ized version
RH Fedora is a success with respect to #1, but has failed at #2. I run RH Fedora and it seems to be a reasonable stable and up-to-date distro, and tries out features like SELinux. As other people have pointed out, FC2 is on target and should be released soon.
But as far as #2 goes it is a failure. There has been no integration with Fedora.us and, as the dialogue shows, RH still decides on all the packages and defaults in a relatively closed way.
Some people have asked why RH, being a for-profit company, could open up development. There seems to be an obvious answer: so the community could help it more. RedHat could still exercise a high degree of control as long as it contributed heavily to the new community project. That's why many people were excited at the new structure---it implied that RH was still committed to develop the distribution, but would make sure that the community was heavily involved as well. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth their effort to "open it up."
One has to ask oneself, here, why one really expects to be part of a community of open source developers when the project in question is run by a for-profit company and there are thousands of people who want to help and think they can.
What I'm saying is, with the decision to split Fedora from the core product lines, Red Hat essentially removed their own motive for expending huge amounts of time in evaluating user input, particularly user-submitted code
Mozilla seemed to do it, though the reports I've heard seemed to indicate it was rough going at first. From the looks of the article, I'm just not sure how the project is part of the open source community. If Redhat doesn't want to spend the bucks to support Fedora, that's fine. If they do want to spend the bucks, that's fine too. But don't lie to us and tell us that Fedora is going to be part of the OSS community, and then not make it part of the community.
I suspect the real problem is just RH didn't have the infrastructure needed to have community development of Fedora.
Aren't Fedora users the ones who don't need RH Enterprise or just don't want to pay for anything? Seems to me that they're the same ones who, if they convince an employer to go OSS, will also try to do it all themselves, to avoid "evil" licensing fees.
I've got Fedora on my laptop, and we run RHEL on our servers at work. It's a nice mix because I want the latest and greatest on my laptop, and I want long-term support on servers. I don't want to wait a year and half between releases for my laptop, I want the 2.6 kernel as soon as it's reasonably stable. That's Fedora.
As for doing everything myself, I don't know about most administrators, but I _hate_ running up2date, hate compiling new versions of software for bug-fixes, and I hate upgrading working production servers to a new version of an OS. Since RHEL solves all those problems rather nicely, it's a great choice.
AccountKiller
Ok, for one - filing a bug using reportbug is going to tag it with the exact package version, you can't get more detailed.
Another thing - comparing Debians release schedule to RedHat is like comparing apples to oranges - that is, ripe apples to rotten oranges. Debian has a *VERY* firm concept of a release - that is, a Debian relase is *STABLE*. It is rock solid. No holes, no bugs, nothing. They will test and test the release, and delay it if necessary, until done.
RedHat et. al need to meet release deadlines because they have to shove out "the latest and greatest" to make $$$. Debian has no such problems - that's why Debian Stable puts all other distros to shame when it comes to reliability and stability. It may not have all the whiz-bangs, but it is *_rock solid_*.
Aside from that, you're obviously trolling with this comment "and at this point it's not even clear they are EVER going to have another release: the current "release" has been delayed *years* already". Debian Stable was released July 2002. They are not "delayed by years". There is no fixed date when the next release will be out - it will be out when it is out.
That said, this is why most people in the know *do* run Debian Unstable and apt-get update && upgrade daily, because it is desktop where stability is not as mission critical. Hell, when there is a bug, it's usually fixed by the next day I find.
I am just confused by the state redhat is in over fedora.
One day no one in redhat gives a damn about their free distro, wanting to put all the focus on advanced $erver. The next day they want to hit deep in the community again.
With the time spent generating a fake (and, yes, amusing - don't get me wrong) IRC chat, this seems to be more of what a typical /. poster would write in response to an article.
This, as of itself, isn't really article material...
Eh, whatever. I frankly couldn't care less how high my karma goes; I have many better things to do than posting on /., which is why I'm on here so rarely. I just don't feel like getting modded into the basement, because I do like the ability to post and be heard occasionally.
-Ed
Web Design & Software Development
Just a comment:
My company buys Red Hat Enterprise licenses (because I advise them to). Personally I use Fedora. The good will Red Hat has built with me over the years is why I keep buying Red Hat licenses at work rather than Suse.
Your only mistake is in assuming that users of Fedora and RH Enterprise are different people. In many cases they are the same.
This is exactly why I love Debian: it's the community. Yes, many Red Hat employees are deeply involved in the GNU/Linux community; but it seems to work both ways with Debian: the members of the GNU/Linux community affect Debian's direction substantially.
Red Hat ships its software as a "complete package", so to speak. You buy the CDs and put them in and install, and that's what you've got. Debian is much more of a "work in progress" that you can actually become a part of. You download the 50-meg install image which fetches a snapshot of what the developers are working on. That seems much more honest to me, because GNU/Linux is a work in progress and always will be.
Of course, some of Debian's politics suck. I run testing on servers and unstable on desktops because stable is just so damned old that it's almost useless. A six-month release schedule like GNOME's would solve this, IMO.
Sure there aren't droves of people using it yet but that's because a lot of people haven't even left Redhat 7.3 yet.
Fedora is an easy to use (especially after adding apt) stable distro. It has some backing from Redhat so my employer likes it. I don't do distro politics, I use what works for me.
The Anti-Blog
...It would be funny if it weren't so painfully fucking accurate.
Welcome to 2004. Here's the rundown, incase you fell asleep:
o VA now pimps SourceForge as a tool to help companies ship jobs overseas. Go ahead, count the number of times you see the word "outsourcing" on their page. Thats right -- That lovely free hosting space your project has? Salesmen inside VA now point to projects like yours and go "See? It works! Now you can fire your employees, and replace them with this handy-dandy website!" They're making an example out of you. Wise up.
o Red Hat isn't interested in talking to you, looking at you, or hearing from you. Be sure to read the fine print at the bottom of the page..the part that reads "The Fedora Project is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc."....Those friendly folks at Red Hat just want you to keep the mill wheel turning, cranking out those security fixes and updates for them to sell. It's real simple. You grow the grain, cut it, and haul it all to the mill, where they'll bag it, and sell it, and let you go hungry. Now, in 2004, rather than being part of the business model, you are a distraction to the business model -- Sorry! No more Red Hat for you! (Fun Fact: They were making money off their end-user desktop distribution -- just not enough to justify listening to your noisy and distracting comments.)
Yaaay! Open source is GRRRREAT!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
The larger the company the more time they generally spend {wasting money, wasting time, shuffling deckchairs, etc} by changing direction all the time. To save face they never explain to outsiders (in this case, their constituency) how the high-level managers responsible have {impossible work constraints, petty political agendas, no idea}. If they were watched the way sports teams are, they might behave a little differently.
But as it is, so many companies seem incapable of simply choosing one competent and respected project manager, with a generally known and respected vision, and simply backing them for a twelve-month period. It's not like there aren't enough such people in the FLOSS community. But that's just not how business works, most of the time.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that (a) my tinfoil hat has some large pits and holes from the air corrosion here in NYC, and (b) I am but a bear of very little brain, and thus may not completely comprehend the astounding master plan of our new RedHat overlords... ...but it seems to me that if RedHat were organizing an astroturfing campaign for Fedora based around /. articles, they might, maybe, just possibly, do it by submitting stories that portrayed Fedora in a positive light, unlike this story?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
" ( apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages )"
So, I admin a lab with 50+ computers, and I configure them to download and install available updates nightly. As an admin, do you think I want to come in to work every morning and have to wonder what new bugs have cropped overnight? Sure, they'll probably be fixed by tomorrow, but what about all the users bugging me NOW?
If you seriously think that Debian Unstable is an alternative to Fedora, you need your head examined.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
After the Fedora deal, I switched all my servers to Debian stable (with a few packages from www.backports.org.) Debian unstable/testing is just not as nicely polished as Redhat for the desktop, so until some really slick looking Gnome/KDE defaults come to Debian testing or stable, or Userlinux actually happens, I have no compelling reason to switch desktops from Fedora. I am interested however, for the simple reason that I don't want to have to worry about managing two different distros for my servers and workstations.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
I have zero problem with that notion. We use Fedora on desktops/laptops as appropriate, and use RHEL on servers that warrant it.
And let's not forget, the projects that Red Hat picks to include in Fedora are getting a lot of user-facetime that helps them improve, independant of how it helps Red Hat. (Minus changes Red Hat makes to that software to make it work in their environment if required)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
At one point I was considering using Debian. I liked the idea of a totally community-based distro, and I also liked how Debian stuck to using only free software.
But now, after using Fedora Core and liking it, I haven't wanted to switch. Still, Debian has been tempting. Until now.
I realize now that the Debian community has a few too many loud-mouthed zealots for my taste. Way too much left-winged "down with the big man!" for me, thanks. Red Hat/Fedora Core seems to have a much more mature community than Debian does.
And if I was to ever consider switching to a different distro which is completely community-based, then I'd probably go for Gentoo anyway.
I think enough people know that RH/FC and Debian have different places in the Free Software community, and that they both can peacefully coexist together in the community. It's just seems there are a few who feel a need to push their distro so much as to start spreading FUD about other distros. Childish and distasteful.
(apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade once / day usually ends up doing around 20+ packages)
RedHat isn't formally supporting Fedora anyways, so I don't get it, what is the incentive?
Let me be the first to say I'm a big Debian fan. I use it on several computers. However, using Debian unstable on my main workstation for about a year was not the most pleasant experience. I don't remember everything, but I'll list a few of the more major annoyances:
1.) Some of us really don't want to download 20 (or over 100) packages, many of them the same update as last week, just to stay up to date with security holes.
2.) Though Debian fans love to say "just use unstable if you want the latest", Debian unstable is often _not_ faster than Fedora or Mandrake at getting the latest version of X, KDE, GNOME, or many other applications. IIRC, it took some time before Debian unstable got KDE 3. Yes, you can add additional sources (which I, actually, do with FC1 on my main workstation now to get the very latest KDE - kde-redhat)
3.) Debian Unstable is not the first priority of the Debian Security project. As such, I wouldn't trust a Debian unstable computer with any directly open ports to the internet, as even the latest "apt-get upgrade" may not fix security bugs that are fixed in Debian stable.
4.) At times, Debian unstable can truly be unstable. For a few weeks sometime last year (January?), KDE broke. A workaround was found a short while later, but it took a few weeks for the packages themselves to be fixed. Depending on what you have installed, Debian unstable can feel rather buggy.
All of this led me to install Debian stable on my computer last spring, which stayed until I got a new computer this February. I found that so long as I grabbed the latest KDE from kde.org's unofficial Debian packages, the system felt pretty new. However, I started to wish for a more updated feel with regards to fonts (which often look terrible in Debian, especially unstable, and I'm not the only one who couldn't quite figure out how to fix them). A more updated application set and the same ability to apt-get a bunch of packages made Fedora feel really nice on my new workstation. Fonts are beautiful, and the kde-redhat project does a nice job of packaging up the latest and greatest KDE. When I do apt-get upgrade, I often get some larger or non-essential upgrades, but it doesn't seem to be the quantity that I went through with Debian unstable. I didn't have to put much fuss into getting my system to look great _and_ have the niceties of the apt system.
I kept browsing the Debian-devel mailing list, hoping to see some sign of when we might see a new release, but some legal and technical issues seem to be pushing it back quite a ways. Therefore, I'm now a believer in the "Debian for the server" mentality. Never before has my desktop looked and functioned so cleanly, with OpenOffice now using some KDE widgets (thanks to the packaging from kde-redhat, I wouldn't have realized it was available otherwise). There was a strange problem with Mozilla in Debian where the occasional line of text would have part of the characters "shifted" a few pixels, which was very distracting. That made me switch to Konqueror way back when, and I still don't use Mozilla much at home - but it's nice to know that in Fedora the Mozilla fonts look great.
Sorry for the long rant, but I think I've got a decent perspective of one user who's tried both Debian unstable, stable, and Fedora on the desktop, and to me it just isn't worth the hassle to use Debian.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
This not [just] a troll. Like many others I guess, I seriously wish the debian community would allocate a little more importance to shipping a current set of apps.
I'm about ready to give up on debian. I have already given up on RH/fedora as too commercial and schizo about the desktop. I used Mandrake for a while, but it was too buggy. p. Currently I'm helping out with Userlinux (yes I know its debian based!) and I hope this project doesn't let me down.
But that irc log was hilarious. Just thought I'd point out that Manrdrake Club includes things like community RPM voting, so if you really think application/feature X is the best thing since sliced bread you can add it, then the other users will vote on it and finally SOMEONE (maybe Mandrake Soft, maybe community member) will put it through the paces (testing > release..possibly). Mandrake seems to be a lot of what Fedora wants to be, only it is, already. And don't forget they release ALL their software under the GPL. Thats pretty amazing for a commercial project.
Quack, quack.
For the sake of argument: If you, as a user or a developer, wanted a community-run distribution, why would you flock to Fedora, rather than using Debian or Gentoo or any of the other community-based distros?
Offical support and direction was difficult to come by. "Read the docs," they said, but there was precious little written about how we were to proceed. Common questions were: how should we communicate, where should we host the project, how do we best get our product to integrated into the RH environment. All the "offical" Fedora components were hosted on RedHat's own CVS server and had entries in RedHat's official Bugzilla site. What about our project? We're writing for Fedora, for RedHat. We were even given the go-ahead by RH staff. Now when do we get CVS and Bugzilla? We want to start building here.
RedHat staff has been "very busy" trying to answer our questions and satisfy our reasonable requests. Apparently there's red tape everywhere--legal and logistical issues enough to make a man cry. Stuff can be fixed, but it takes time.
We sit and twiddle our thumbs hoping for some answers. Status updates are few and generally cryptic. RedHat is still "very, very busy" and is apparently making progress.
In the mean time, other commitments have commanded my time and I've had to abandon my post as a Fedora developer--at least for now. Now I look back and wonder how much I actually got to contribute.
It was a wonderful environment. Your work was almost guaranteed to be included in the distro (assuming you were filling a posted need). And I, a nameless nobody in the Linux world, had on multiple occasions asked questions and gotten prompt, insightful answers from both Eric Raymond and Alan Cox. I really felt like I was doing something important.
But the delays and disorganization, good heavens. What frustration is was to try to get any offical assistance or direction from RedHat. Their developer support infrastructure was nonexistant at best. To borrow an old metaphor, they were building a passenger jet in the air with Fedora, and we the passengers expected to be joining something a little more ..erm.. functional than we experinced.
Fedora's not a bad idea. It's a great idea. I was (and still am) fairly excided about the whole prospect. But it would have been nice if RedHat had prepared itself and built some sort of support system before bringing the rest of us on board.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
I'm working in a company who moved to Fedora for the same reasons, but I can't say that being current particularly bothers me.
Fedora is more 'bleeding edge' than Debian, but thats also a way of saying it's 'less stale'. Its not as bleeding edge as the Test series of Fedora which have had some odd problems.
We've been running Core 1 since it came out, in over 50 machines. We havn't had a single kernel panic or software component failure in any of them.
How do we manage it? We have a local mirror of the Fedora Core distribution, and we also mirror the updates. We don't integrate the updates into our distribution until we've tested them - unless they are trivial and not likely to cause a major problem.
So, for most applications, like webservers and mailservers, I don't see what the issue is. Fedora isn't any less 'stable' than any other distribution. Who is to say that staying up to date is more or less stable than having 2-3 year old code that is only patched to fix specific, known vulnerabilities?
With no actual evidence of a problem, its hard to know if there is a problem or not. If we see evidence of Fedora being unstable, or unsafe to use, then we'll re-evaluate the situation - but right now Fedora is doing everything we need to to do and more.
Basically, it comes down to this (which I've been steadily posting in every Fedora/RH story since the whole fiasco started):
.NET was for Microsoft -- unclear, confusing, had far too many things under one name, and ended up being kind of nice but not all that astounding.
* Fedora originally was a third-party project to package lots of software for Red Hat. Red Hat decided to add a bunch of Fedora's packages into their mainstream repository. This is the complete and total extent of how users have been affected by Fedora. More packages.
* Red Hat's salespeople apparently (and in retrospect, quite unfortunately) decided that it would be a really opportune time to try to get some money by telling business people that the merged Fedora/Red Hat wasn't particularly stable or reliable. In reality, the merged Fedora is exactly the same as RH 9 and previous releases. Mass Slashdot confusion ensues, and a number of people who dislike RH for one reason or another (distro grudges, etc) promptly propagate and distort this.
* The original Fedora announcement contained a lot of references to how the merged Fedora was community-driven. In reality, not a whole lot was changed. You can still submit bugs, test packages, submit patches and the like -- but you could do all that before.
* The original Fedora respositories (found on fedora.us) are still up, and being updated, and are not always the same as the Red Hat merged Fedora repositories. This causes a great deal of confusions (especially since people mirroring the repositories may be mirroring one or the other).
Basically, the merging of Fedora was a good idea technically (merge a bunch of well-made packages into mainstream Red Hat) that was completely and utterly mishandled from a PR point of view. It was tied to attempts from various RH people to move people to RHEL, to differentiate RHEL from RH/Fedora, and to involve more people in the project. It's kind of like
If I were RH, I'd get the fedora.us repositories synced up *now* *permanently* (or work out a name change or something). I'd release a press release describing the whole situation so that there's *finally* an authoritative document so that the 90% of folks out there that are confused by the complicated situation have a single source to be pointed to.
Seriously, RH does some great engineering work, but SuSE seems to be a hell of a lot more competent when it comes to doing business deals and presenting a solid image. Someone up at Red Hat needs to grab the damn reins and tell the Fedora integration people and the PR people to have a consistent story and to clarify things for users. I can very definitely say that the rampant speculation and ongoing uncertainty is a Bad Thing for Red Hat.
Here's the situation from an outsider's point of view:
* RHEL is a "production server" distro. It has one major selling point -- it is infrequently updated. This wouldn't work very well for most Linux users (Linux people tend to want the latest-and-greatest), but it's awfully nice if you don't want to hassle with upgrading your system every six months. This is a pretty decent reason to purchase the system. It's kinda like Debian stable -- a cross between a slower-moving OS like OpenBSD and the more rapidly-changing Linux.
* Fedora is not unstable or flaky or beta or development any more than the earlier RH releases were. It is quite usable for "serious" work. However, it is updated more frequently than RHEL, and has a shorter EOL.
May we never see th