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Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora
loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.
Any company, even one as evil and condescending as Microsoft, needs to engage their customers. It is just a rule of business that if you don't listen to your customers they will leave you.
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
My only experience with Fedora came in the form of FC2. It was the closest thing to Linux ME I have ever seen.
The problem Red Hat has had is not that Fedora is slow on the bleeding edge, but the group seems to be ignoring user request for simple feature fixes [citing a 6 month release schedule]. On the other hand by distancing themselves form free (as in beer) distros, RH has begun making money and gaining mindshare in the business world. RH can loose all they want in the desktop end, but as long as they keep the workstaion/support contract end alive and well they will continue to make money.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Oh man, Red Hat were warned about this two years ago. Every man and his dog knew this would happen, and said so openly here on Slashdot. Now suddenly, RedHat have figured this out. Me thinks they are slow learners. I'm still running the last version of RedHat before this debacle occured, and when I can muster the effort will leave my many MANY years of RedHat behind in favour of Debian.
And to add to that, I believe that all the Windows IT professionals that continue to ignore Linux will end up on the you know what end of the stick.
.com era and won't leave.
The trend towards Linux systems has been steadily going up, never down, and there's no sign of slow down.
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
That's my problem with RedHat as a whole.
I ran Fedora for a while. It was OK. But then another Fedora release came out, and there was no supported upgrade path--you had to reinstall again from scratch from a CD.
Well, I used to have to reinstall from scratch every six months when I ran Windows. That's why I switched to Linux. I want to install from scratch from CD exactly once, barring disk failure, and then have updates flow down automatically.
So now I run Debian and Gentoo. If RedHat want to get me running Fedora, they'll have to fix the upgrade problem. Getting rid of RPM would be a good start.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3 just fine. Put the FC3 cd in, boot it, and select "Upgrade", I did the same thing from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2. I even upgraded Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 1. What's the big deal here? It's worked exactly like this since I started on redhat in the 5.2 days, and probably before that too, but I didn't use RH before that version.
On other systems I've even done upgrades on Fedora Core with YUM.
Also, please tell me what's wrong with RPM. Don't bring apt-get into this, cause RPM isn't a repository installer. If you want to talk software repository based install, you need to compare dpkg to RPM, and apt-get to YUM.
I'm tired of people saying RPM sucks, and then comparing RPM to apt-get. I know, it's the "cool thing" to make fun of RPM.
Not sure if any of the marketing folks at Red Hat are reading this but here's my $0.02:
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
We just need need a Fedora Advanced Server 3.0, or 4.0. We need something that exactly mirrors a complete Advanced Server installation like whitebox linux. Even better the kernel ideally should be the same compilation that will be used in the next AS.
We dont need a stripped down, rebranded disro "here this is for you" linux. Just something that will play with all the redhat-certified software and apps out there.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Red Hat as always continues to develop more kernel,gnome, and freedesktop code then anyone else. They pay the salaries of some of the greatest minds in the linux community and are mostly responsible for where Linux is today. Give them a little slack... Fedora 1 is RH10, same engineers and process, they just stopped asking for money.
Regards,
Steve
There is no reason for you or the CentOS guys to be one bit pissed about this. The letter from RedHat's legal team was very polite and the demands made were very simple: they just wanted perfect clarity on the nature of CentOS and RedHat Enterprise Linux. They did not want CentOS taking Enterprise clients away from their products. I think this is completely fair as the CentOS team USES the RedHat sources that were given to the community by RedHat to build their distro. BTW, I run CentOS on all my servers at work, so I have no axe to grind with the CentOS guys.
It's nice to see that they acknowledge their mistake, years after the fact. I could have told them at the time, you know.
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I really appreciate the effort that a lot of folks put into Fedora. In fact, I think I started testing it out around FC1 test1. Everything works great here.. on multiple boxes. And if I need help..since I live on freenode, I can ask in #fedora ...generally nice folks.
Look all flames aside. I've been using Linux for my workstations, home, etc, for 6 years, and Fedora has never let me down.
Mod this how you see fit. Peace
FC1 -> RH10, FC2 -> RH11, FC3 -> RH12.
:-( ) transparency is morphing into allowing community involvement.
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
-Seth
"That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products."
;-)
Pft. I wish all the people posting crap like this could see inside Red Hat. Virtually all of our engineering work (with the exception of some dedicated people doing backporting of features as per enterprise requests for RHEL... e.g. the reason why RHEL3 already had the most desireable kernel 2.6 features despite being 2.4 based) goes into Fedora (and before that Red Hat Linux). It always has. It always will.
As always, Red Hat continues to increase its engineering resources. Far far more work goes into a current Fedora Core release than ever went into a Red Hat Linux release.
There was never a magic change of heart when we realized we were deserting the Linux community. There was a tragic, stupid, and avoidable communications fuckup. We probably should have renamed RHL -> Fedora at a different point than RHEL appeared. But anyway, Fedora isn't and never has been abandonware, or our "second best effort".
Ironically, one of the things Red Hat, as a company, has been bad at is pimping itself to the community. We do tons of the "shit work" that keeps Linux going (who do you think pays for most of glibc, gdb, gcc, a huge chunk of the boring work in gnome, lots of upstream kernel work, etc etc) but fail marketing our efforts to get m4d pr0pz. Red Hat engineering has always prided itself on doing most of its work upstream instead of maintaining large patch sets in-distro (which most companies haven't done, and still don't do). The day we don't, you'll hear Alan Cox screaming from inside Red Hat
-Seth
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the .com era and won't leave.
And for some reason, human nature will radically alter and the Linux IT world won't be filled with underqualified people hoping to make a buck too?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I have to admiit that we have switched almost everything off of Redhat and over to SuSE now, but here is what our company wants.
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.