Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open?

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."

Comments

FUDCon

[Verveonica]

Ah...so they are sucking them in and grinding them up into FUD! Don't go to the conference man - Fedora is people!

Re:FUDCon

[Golias]

Fedora is people!

You are my new hero.

You also owe me a keyboard, as I just sprayed my soda all over mine while reading that.

-Signed,
Yet Another Former Red Hat Linux User

Re:FUDCon

[demachina]

"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

Re:FUDCon

[CapnGrunge]

Hahaha, that makes it doubly funny for Mexicans, since FUD is also a well-known mark of minced meat.

I am just confused

[superpulpsicle]

One day redhat wants to put all the best resources in improving RH enterprise series.

The next day redhat wants to put all the best resources in rescuing RH Fedora.

Life was just better when there was a universally superior redhat 9. We could have successfully been at redhat 10 by now.

Conference acronym

[wiredog]

"Attention all personnel! Incoming Microsoft press release! Set FUD CON 1 throughout the facility!"

Re:FUDCon1?!?!

[sopwith]

Those among us who chose the name have a sense of humor. ;-)

Maybe some people don't find it ironic that a conference intended to eliminate FUD and promote open information sharing would be named "FUDcon".

Even Linux companies

[paranode]

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.

Re:Even Linux companies

[JudasBlue]

And they have lost at least some paid server installs over this. I mean, I understand their thinking. But I know of two techs who were Redhat-centric who switched first for desktops because they felt that Fedora wasn't stable enough. This led to the same two techs starting to recommend SuSE's server product for installs.

I know I have switched to SuSE for desktops now, and am still clinging to RH for servers, but am likely to start working with Deb or SuSE in the future, since if I am going to have a different distro on the server than on the desktop, I might as well real-world test some other toys.

I realize this is just guys like me working small shops, but I really think that by abandoning the RHL line, RH caused a group of low- to mid-level techs to start considering other options, when RH had been our default. If Fedora's QC had been there from the start, this might not have happened, but a series of small bugs, including not dual boot installing cleanely from the default installer, ran some of us off. These problems are probably fixed now, but the damage is done. I know I won't go back to Fedora, because I don't trust their QC process.

Re:Even Linux companies

[Karn]

Warning: Redhat Rant Ahead

How does letting Joe Smoe and his small business run RHEL without the support take focus from the server market? Redhat doesn't have to exclude people who can't afford their support from running their distribution. They could just not support you unless you purchase support, and let you run their stable product.

The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare. Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder. Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.

Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.

Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.

Note: I migrated my users and servers from SunOS and Digital Unix to Redhat about 5 years ago, and migrated servers from Redhat 9 to Debian Woody about 2 years ago, and am currently in the market for a Desktop Linux replacment for Fedora.

Re:Even Linux companies

[RedHat Rocky]

"...but I really think that by abandoning the RHL line, RH caused a group of low- to mid-level techs to start considering other options, when RH had been our default."

Bang, hammer hits nail on head. When Redhat started the whole Fedora thing, they left the small/middle tier folks without an option. It was either spend the big bucks for Enterprise or roll the dice on Fedora. They didn't seem to realize that a lot of grassroots support depended on that small/middle tier.

Yeah yeah, they're running a business (and I'm a share holder, so what) but rule one of business would be don't piss off your customers unless you can afford to lose them. I think they undervalued what the grassroot support was worth. Novell seems to understand this, perhaps, but it could also be they are trying to see if they can bleed Redhat out of the market before upping their price for their distro. Time will tell.

Re:Even Linux companies

[jav1231]

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.

I like Fedora

[drewzhrodague]

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.

Re:Yum VS RedHat Update Network

[nzkoz]

The gnome applet is actually using yum.

The 'redhat network' is for enterprise customers only.

Re:Here's some pointers

[nzkoz]

That's just *not* going to happen, Thomson charges $5 per 'unit'. If the mp3 rpms were on the installation CD, I'd imagine that redhat would be liable for that fee. Even if only non-americans installed it.

Besides, http://rpm.livna.org is your friend.

Re:Gentoo

[goldspider]

"we *must* unite if we want to get more market share."

Since when was the purpose of Linux to gain market share?

I was under the impression that Linux is just a free/open alternative to commercial operating systems. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Here's some pointers

[Lightman_73]

You know what ?

Launch your preferred shell, then :

su -
yum search mp3
yum install xmms-mp3
exit

The first two points can be skipped if you 1) are already logged in as root (bad), and 2) you already know the name of the xmms-mp3 package (oh, wait, I just told you... ;))...

Is it really so hard ?

Reputation?

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

After trying Core 1 and 2, I switched to SUSE and never looked back. I've heard Core 3 isn't as full of bugs as the first 2 were but...I like SUSE now. Things *just work* compared to Fedora. Plus the whole distribution seems more polished and unified. Also, it's much easier to buy SUSE 9.2 Professional at Fry's for my desktop and even a server or two and buy enterprise level support for it if I need to (haven't yet). Much easier to justify to management. But Fedora has its place. I'm just curious to see if SUSE will start catching on with corporate America. I'm doing my best at my company. One more thing...compare SUSE 9.2 Porfessional to Redhat WS. Significant difference on price.

Re:Gentoo

[Lord Kano]

What the fuck is wrong with you?

It'll be hard to find two projects with such radically different goals.

Red Hat's goal is stability. 2 years with out a reboot kind of stable. Gentoo is about staying current, and fast execution.

I don't user either Distro. But I'd hate to see them ruin both distros by merging them for the sake of merging.

LK

Re:Gentoo

[m50d]

Gaining marketshare is a good idea as it should make more hardware manufacturers give us drivers and/or specs. Yes, the primary aim of linux is simply to be a good operating system - but for me, it would be much better if it had more driver support, which would be the case if it had more marketshare.

Finally, but timely?

[augustz]

When Redhat first started up Fedora (to much noise everywhere) I spent a fair amount of time poking around with an eye towards getting involved.

In particular, for folks creating their own internal RPM's for packages (for a long time php-devel was not packaged for example), the idea of being able to mainline packages was very appealing, and similar to other open projects (gentoo though debian etc).

But going to the site, nothing like this was there. Pretty dissapointing. In other words, it was existing bug reporting every distro and many commercial packages have plus some marketing (this omits other things that were offered, but was my feeling at the time).

Finally, it looks like they will be making some efforts to really create an enviroment folks are able to contribute in. A shame they weren't able to harness the initial energy and interest, but these are the right types of moves, though coming a little late perhaps.

Also useful to note that a fair number of places showed up filling in gaps in redhat's offering. Freshrpms and friends come to mind for example. But with some more creativity I think redhat could have really put together something exciting.

Re:Finally, but timely?

[gdek]

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.

Re:Finally, but timely?

[crush]

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.

Re:Gentoo

[af_robot]

Yea, but what is good in reinventing wheel every time a new distro started?
apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.

Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!

About time

[OblongPlatypus]

To everyone who's trying to interpret the "intentions" behind this "new move" from Redhat: This is basically what they've been planning all along - they've just been dreadfully slow going about it.

Re:Gentoo

[bankman]

I think RedHat should somehow also support gentoo - it is very popular distro now and everyone will benefit if such a huge linux brand as redhat whould help it. They can merge Fedora and Gentoo, or just dedicate developers to some key gentoo projects. I don't think that a million of a slightly different linux distribution is a good thing - we *must* unite if we want to get more market share.

First of all, nobody *must* unite.

Having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that RedHat adopts anything or will contribute anything publicly and specifically to Gentoo's idea of a distro. They are in the enterprise server/workstation distro and service business, not in the "tweak and compile your distro so that it becomes unmaintainable for the enterprise market" business.

As a company in RedHat's position, I would do everything but associate my products with Gentoo, which in the enterprise market can be viewed as useless. Remember that time is money and stability everything.

That doesn't mean that I don't like Gentoo, but the community driven distro that comes closest to what you want in the enterprise market, is Debian.

docs

[IceFox]

How about updating the *$^&%$& document on how to make rpm's? Is that so much to ask?

It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years. Look for yourself here

If you want people to help out you should update the doc! There are so many edge cases and hidden options it is insane and any new developers will pull there hair out. Not only that, but put the documentation in the cvs so everyone can help update it.

For something as critical as RPM Red Hat should be ashamed that their developer documentation is so bad.

-Benjamin Meyer

scared of Ubuntu?

[blixblix]

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.

Re:scared of Ubuntu?

[Wesley Felter]

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

Yes. Fedora was planned to be open from day 1.

Re:Gentoo

[Qzukk]

apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.

These aren't wheels. They're NOT interchangable.

You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile.

That is, if you can even get gentoo started. You'll probably need debian's sleek and, well, skimpy installer to get it started on a machine with 4MB.

Or what if its not a PC at all? Debian's installer runs on what... 8? 12 platforms? I've lost count.

Or, if you're clueless or just need everything detected for you because you can't tell your video card from your monitor model, you want a redhat or mandrake install that supports a few architectures, but has automatic hardware detection, and so on.

Completely different target markets here.

Re:Gentoo

[RealAlaskan]

Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!

Those people are doing what they do because they want to. No PHBs involved. If you could tell them to work on something else, they'd probably just stop working.

These ``developer resources'' aren't a limited number of corporate code monkeys, they are folks who are volunteering to do something they want to do. Because everyone is self-assigned, ``we'' have exactly enough people to do what is being done, and not nearly enough people to follow anyone's grand scheme, even if that grand scheme took far fewer ``developer resources''.

That's the strength and weakness of libre, collaberative development. Each person does whatever he wants to, and if that means three hundred thousand people are writing a new grep or a new apt-get at any given moment, well, that's not wasted effort. It makes them happy, and that's reason enough. When someone (like maybe you) suggests that something else should be making them happy, it shows a profound misunderstanding of how ``developer resources'' get allocated outside the corporation.

My point is that if you were to try to choke off development of all those competing projects, you would not only lose the benefit of the competition, but you would find that most of the people who you thought would be working on your favorite project are instead doing something else with their free time, like surfing pr0n or seeing their girlfriends. You might even wind up with fewer ``developer resources'' working on your favorite!

Finally, the libre licensing means that a really good idea which shows up in any of the competing projects can and probably will wind up in all of them.

Re:Here's some pointers

[russint]

Actually, this only works if you have already added "rpm http://rpm.livna.org/ fedora/3/i386 stable unstable testing" to /etc/yum.conf

Really intuative...

Re:Here's some pointers

[Donny Smith]

>>As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default.

>That *EXACTLY* the reason I left Redhat.

That *EXACTLY* the reason I have never left Windows.

CVS

[coolfrood]

The Fedora CVS is available at http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/. Lots of goodies there!

Already Happened

[Inhibit]

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 ;).

Re:Gentoo

[wolf31o2]

Umm... I've got a better idea. How about Red Hat keeps doing their own thing, and if Gentoo likes it, we'll take it and use it. The same thing can apply for Gentoo's projects and Red Hat/Fedora. There is nothing stopping them from taking our work and using it, that's the whole point of us all using the GPL. Red Hat doesn't have to "dedicate developers" to work on our project any more than we have to do so to work on theirs. If I submit a kernel patch, or a patch to hwsetup, then I am submitting it for all Linux users to use, not one distribution. You concept of how distributions work is pretty well off kilter and not at all how the developer community works.

Ditching RH Desktop was a dumb move.

[Isldeur]

When redhat ditched their normal desktop product in favor of this "Fedora" thing it struck me as a critically stupid move.

Redhat got to the height it did because of one thing, namely mindshare. Today the people I know who need to use linux for business normally use Redhat. Why? Because other business products are certified against it.

But while RH retains that gravity, it's loosing it's momentum simply because it is loosing mindshare. Why? My guess is that they've diluted things with this Fedora Project. It's not "RedHat" per se any more.

So they've closed the door on those coming in from the ground floor. And what happens? Other distributions spring up. I started using redhat at version 2.2 back with kernel 1.2.13 but I've now tried other ways of doing things - non RPM based distributions and I'm telling you I wouldn't go back. Gone are the days I need to go culling through freshrpms for some PACKAGE-connectiva.i386.rpm substitute for RPM Hell. Things are happy here now. :)

That's nothing.

[theendlessnow]

Under the new revised GPL (soon to be released), if you just use a GPL program you must make 12 copies of the source and distribute them to your friends and family members.

RedHat implemented this for a week. One engineer said, "Man.. I mean everyone I know has a copy now. And I've received so many copies that I can't see out the rear view window of my car." Another engineer found two CDs in his hamburger during lunch! "This is getting ridiculous....", he said.

Suprisingly, there are areas of M$ that have been shut down because of the plethora of CDs that are now littering the campus. Bill Gates was heard saying, "See the problems that free software causes!" M$ has set up a charitable foundation for Victims of Free Software to help combat the problem. You can also download a "free" (DRM protected) video explaining the virtues of having just ONE supplier for all software and why Free software does not count.

Re:Fix XP dual boot

[crush]

That would be the same bug that occured for all distors using an early 2.6.kernel and partitioning code based on Parted. (e.g. SuSE 9.1) A clear write up of this problem in case someone is still suffering from it and it's solution is provided by Jef Spaleta here

The reason behind the naming

[Nailer]

Is posts like the above.

* Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux. New Open Source technology regularly (well, actually more regularly) perhaps at the expense of app compatibility - ie, like when you upgraded to NPTL from Linuxthreads in Red Hat 8 and had to upgrade your JRE.

* The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about? Complaining that you didn't read the release announcement for Red Hat 9, which mentioned the support period?

Red Hat staff spend their says working on Fedora. In fact, Fedora is the thing that's maintained over time. It has its own beta cycle. Report a bug and a Red Hat staff member will fix it. RHEL is forked from it every so often.

If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox. You pay $0 to use the software. You pay money, however, to get unlimited support calls to Red Hat every year. Try that with Sun, Microsoft, or most other Linux distros.

Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?

Oh wait, cause we have more business market share than every other Linux distro combined. Red Hat, despite its merits, is That Distro They Make You Use At Work.

Oh, yeah, and some dickead tried Red Hat circa 1998, noted the dependency resolution, and doesn't understand the concept of software improving over time.

Idiots.

Fedora was a bad idea

[doodleboy]

So Redhat has this great plan to monetize its relationship with its users. It'll split its line into RHEL, which is being faithfully copied by the free alternatives CentOS and Whitebox, and Fedora, a time based distribution meant to be a testbed for future versions of RHEL. Fantastic. I guess I'm supposed to be a beta tester for some enterprise version of linux that I can't/won't pay for.

So the high end stuff is going to get copied about 8 minutes after its released. And completely free, stable, excellent linux distributions like ubuntu, gentoo, debian, et al, are available that are not meant to be some sort of farm team for the real distribution. How did it not occur to the powers that be at Redhat that their base would drift away to other distributions?

Take myself. I've used Redhat since v5.2, but I'm switching to ubuntu. It's so fast, so stable, it's free, there's a great upgrade path, etc. What do I need Redhat/Fedora for?