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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."
Ah...so they are sucking them in and grinding them up into FUD! Don't go to the conference man - Fedora is people!
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.
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.
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.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Launch your preferred shell, then
Is it really so hard ?
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
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.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
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
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The Fedora CVS is available at http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/. Lots of goodies there!
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.
Why do I keep typing pythong?
"...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.
Anything is possible given time and money.
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.
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.