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Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the nice-hat dept.

Chillybott writes "CNET reports that Red Hat is trying to bolster more support for the Fedora project by giving the users more control over and input into the development process. The article states that they have made their CVS repositories visible and hints that soon members of the Fedora community will be able to act as distribution maintainers. Seems like a good idea to me, although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired."

9 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Even Linux companies by paranode · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Have to make money to survive. They are focusing on their server market now, because at the present that's where most of the Linux use is.

    1. Re:Even Linux companies by jav1231 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      They didn't just abandon "leeches" they abandoned customers. Many companies were left with 1 year or more agreements that became useless when they dropped support for RHDL. This pissed real customers off! They weren't losing money on boxed sets, something that RH admitted in a past /. interview. They just didn't want to focus on it anymore. Well, it cost them. It may be that they want to back out of Fedora altogether. RH is becoming Sun (think about it, really, scary, eh?) and Sun is becoming...well...some kinda proprietary version of Richard Stallman.
      If you want to run RHEL but not pay for support, run CentOS. Personally, I'd pay for support if it was reasonable.

  2. I like Fedora by drewzhrodague · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I actually like Fedora. I've been a Red Hat fan since 4.2 sparc (IIRC, MHILAS). Relatively consistant installation process, sensemaking install dirs, and RPMs have been slightly more fun than building source for this non-developer.

    Currently I use FC3 for a desktop, and FC2 for a GIS workstation. I have installed Red Hat at dotcoms, small businesses, hosting facilities, and mega-corporations. Of course, I'm familiar with it, and I remember making a DNS server from junk broken Windows box to full function in 20 minutes.

    I have been considering contributing to their package, I guess now I can.

    --
    Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
  3. Re:Distro forks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Redhat has been for many years a FORK of Linux.

    Fedora was an attempt to bring OSS developers into the Redhat fold, though Redhat claims that it was to give back to the OSS community.

  4. scared of Ubuntu? by blixblix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Am i the only one who thinks this is a response to the recent success that Ubuntu has had?

    I've personally been all over the place with my choice of preferred distro. Ubuntu is the nicest desktop linux I've found.

    --
    Self-promotion: blixtra.org
  5. Re:Finally, but timely? by gdek · · Score: 2, Interesting


    Yep. Exactly right.

    The 3rd party repos that have popped up to fill the gaps have provided an invaluable service. The goal of Fedora Extras is similar -- but instead of providing individual repositories, Fedora Extras will provide a centralized repository that is more tightly integrated with Fedora Core. Ultimately, anyone who can build a package that conforms to the rules will be able to contribute to Fedora Extras.

    And timely? Maybe not as timely as it could have been... but better late than never.

  6. Re:FUDCon by demachina · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired"

    I dont know about that .... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt pretty much sums up Fedora and the new Red Hat pretty darn well. You know since they:

    - stuck a knife in the back of their loyal users, customers and flagship distribution that was a popular and well known standard. If nothing else they don't know anything about protecting their brand
    -Started a subscription update service and then in less than a year(and the length of a subscription) stuck a knife in it too and screwed all the people who were paying them money for it.
    - Started Fedora and tried to sucker a bunch of unpaid volunteers in to doing all their work for them while they kept all the control and power. Certainly a good way to improve your profitability if you can find enough unpaid and cluefull volunteers who are suckers enough to work on a project on which they have no say while you rake in the salary and the stock options.
    - And of course with Enterprise Linux they converted Linux from being the low cost solution in to one that makes Windows, SCO and proprietary Unix look almost cheap

    --
    @de_machina
  7. Already Happened by Inhibit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The fork/split stuff already happened. With no one contributing to Fedora, they pretty much went off and did CentOS and White Box.

    Wrote up a short editorial over at PCBurn with links to the relevant distributions (or you could use Google ;).

    --
    You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
  8. Re:Finally, but timely? by crush · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Part of the slowness of Fedora Extras was that Red Hat had to set up a single CVS system for it and also merge three pre-existing internal CVS into it. Bound to take a fair bit of time to do. Seth Vidal gives a good insight on the process in his blog including the rolling out of a demonstration Pre-Extras so that people can see progress. Hopefully all the excellent independent packagers: Dag Wieers, Axel Thimm, Matthias Saou will be able to find a way to contribute to this project.