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Interview with Red Hat VP Michael Tiemann
david_ross writes "An interview with Red Hat's Vice President Michael Tiemann has just been posted on LinuxQuestions.org. His responses in the interview show that RedHat's community product, Fedora, has a bright future: "The project has been incredibly successful, and we have a lot of people outside of Red Hat to thank for that. What Red Hat must now do is to finish the job of making Fedora a true community project by publishing, and getting accepted, a governance model". "
I still say it was a mistake to kill off RHL. It made the name "Red Hat" synonymous with Linux, at least to the casual observer. And people like to stick with what they know.
I agree. I always thought Fedora was a bone thrown to those who had used RHL. They were actually making money on RHL which means they dropped it for focus, not profit. I think it's hurt them, no matter what they say. I think they are doing okay, don't get me wrong, but the community as a whole thinks less of them for it. I refuse to try Fedora for the reasons you stated. Red Hat doesn't want my business unless I buy enterprise versions which means unless I have a user base. Caldera got a bad rep for much of the same type behavior, back in the day. Hey, it works for them. Red Hat really has no interest in you and me until we code something, put it back into the community, and they incorperate it into their workstation distro.
Wait a minute. You criticize Redhat for charging for support, but then you claim that "Debian really needs a 'grown up' large company to provide commercial support, that will quiet the fears of managers."
Am I missing something?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
So because they stopped supporting the Free Iso's you went to distro where there isn't any support? Where you will face the same problem of the products eventually being dropped from support as well? How do you benefit? Either way you don't have support. Your not making much sense especially running Gentoo which for all of its merits isnt' a business oriented distro. This is expecially laugable if indeed your business is as large as your claiming. Somehow I dont' see many Fortune 500 companies running Gentoo as their desktop.
"Suse looks like its moving in the opposite direction of redhat so that might be an option for a good option down the road."
How? Suse is mirroring Red Hat as closely as possible on the business side with their licensing schemes.
I swear I really question the judgement of anti-redhat users sometimes. They bitch about Red hat and then run right into the arms of another for profit Distro maker and somehow expect everything to change. I'm not saying Red Hat is some sort of angel for trying to transition their customers from ubber cheap Servers to their Enterprise brand but there are way too many "Red Hat is evil and distro X is my savior" posts here from people who are not well informed and just want to spite Red Hat.
Although I wish RH lots of luck with Fedora I can't say that I'm interested in what they offer.
Their commercial offerings are a pain in the butt, the kernel they use is patched all over the place and they don't even offer support for normal Linux kernels. For all intents and purposes they are *not* a Linux distribution but a clever new way to achieve another vendor lock-in scenario.
My *proffessional* experience with their products have been nothing short of disappointing, all the advantages that Linux has, like flexibility and standardisation, RH has eliminated them one by one with their stringent support policies and nothing less then time consuming and awkward ways of keeping machines updated. They don't even guarantee API compatibility within major releases so I can't even update machines without testing the updates first. I don't want to start a "my distro is better than yours" argument but why would I go through all the aformentioned trouble when there a distro like Debian does guarentee API compatibility within major releases, can do security updates automatically without any worries, and is commercially supported by multiple companies as well? In every way I can think of it their commercial server products feel antiquated and awkward to administer.
IMNSHO The products RH sells have nothing in common with Linux and the reason why it got so popular in the first place.
Not enough packages? You obviosuly haven't used it. In previous posts people were complaining that too many packages were installed with it. The thing with Fedora is it goes through extensive Q&A relatvie to the other distros so not every package you may find in gentoo will be in a defualt install of Fedora. This is why you can easily use outside reopsitories like DAG, Freshrpms, Fedora.us, Livna.org etc.. etc.. Fedorafaq.org is your friend. Fedora is really an amzing distro, especially Core 3. And more importantly, its community is gigantic and if you need help, the people at #fedora are almsot always willing to help and are very nice. If you try going to #debian, you'll get laughed at and ridiculed out of there. We've actually had people come to #fedora saying that they don't run fedora but the debian channel refused to help them so they came here for help, and sure enough they were helped. Fedora is also the only distro that works on my laptop, I can't stand Suse and that god forsaken YaST, but Mandrake is nice and I wouldn't mind dual booting with it, but it refuses to play nice with my laptop. So for the past year or so I've run Fedora and its the best decision I've made. I still do run debian on some older servers, but FC2 is stable enough that I'm phasing out the Debian with Fedora. If you haven't given it a shot recently, you should.
Regards,
Steve