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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.
I've been following rawhide, and I can tell you there has been much more active development lately. GNOME 2.9 is one of the big things introduced recently. Hardly a week goes by there aren't 100 packages or more that have been patched/updated. It's exciting to follow now.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Man, sometimes I wish Slashdot did user-generated polls.
Anyhow, some questions to you Red Hat customers...
When Red Hat started Fedora and then switched its major focus to the enterprise, how many of you stayed loyal to Red Hat, and how many of you went to another distro?
And, of those that left, how many of you are willing to embrace the return of the prodigal son?
I'm in the same boat as you. I tried the redhat enterprise option and the software was a little on the old side. Naturally I tried fedora. Core 1 was pretty nice, but cores 2 and 3 broke a couple of the apps we use. Most notibly components in matlab we depend on. Now I've turned to Debian. We can use stable for the servers and testing for the workstations. Testing is new enough that it comes with firefox, but not so new that it breaks the stuff we need.
It was a shame really. I happily paid for the RHE download. I used redhat for seven years and I think they deserve some support. They are focusing on their corporate customers, and that is where they should go if it keeps them in business. They still support many free software developers and give back to the community.
The only things we have running redhat at school are some rack systems that are behind a firewall. I still have it installed on my desktop at home, but that computer is being replaced by my new powerbook. I still like them as a company, I'm just no longer their target audience.
-- john
Did redhat go after $ in the enterprise and lose sight of Linux developers? I'd say yes.
They co-opted the fedora project,gave it ver little resources and virtually *NO* promotion, and tried to downplay it's even existence to all the corporate customers that they are pitching yearly per-server RHN contracts to.
People who had used SuSE before went back and tried SuSE and discovered that SuSE had newer software versions than Redhat
People who might have thought that Debian was only for masochists discovered Ubuntu and decided it was fast, easy, and didn't become "legacy" in 12 months
People who wanted more updated packages and hated breaking RPM dependencies and like to occasionally build things from source or optomize their packages found Gentoo and decided that rebuilding their entire OS could be fun, easy, and that their OS didn't need to become Legacy in 12 months.
Personally, I think that Gentoo is probably the purest Linux distribution, and that if you want the stability of a tried and true distribution that Ubuntu is the best Debian I've seen.
More developers have shifted away from Redhat, and they in turn have been influencing many other people's choice of distribution, and ultimately they are losing mindshare.
I think Redhat has finally realized that they *need* those developers and they're now doing a strange dance to try to pump up Fedora enough to excite the development community, but not enough to dissuade corpoprate customers for paying them for access to patches for RHEL.
"Hey everyone (except corporate customers), look Fedora's great!"
"Hey everyone (except developers), Fedora's unstable and unsupported, use RHEL!"
Same here, I was on Red Hat 8, didn't really see the value of going to RH9 since I build my own kernels and KDE(did really much like they way they butchered KDE in RH8 either). I think there was some binary compatiability issue that they used to justify jumping a major version to them to RH9 when it should have been 8.1 In hindsight it appears to me more like Red Hat need to put out a psuedo major release to milk revenue out of their old product line and old customers to bridge them over the traumatic jump to Enterprise and Fedora.
I bought one year of subscription update service for RH8 for my machines, not because I had to but it was convenient and back then I didn't mind sending a little money Red Hat's way to support them.
Of course they proceeded to end of life Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 within the space of a few months and the remainder of my subscription was essentially worthless and there was no good upgrade path other than pay an arm and a leg for Enterprise or risk Fedora and Fedora struck me as strategicly chaotic(i.e. whose in charge there?). There was zero chance of me paying them more money for enterprise after they'd just screwed me on my old subscription.
I had a long flame fest hear with a Red Hat employee whose login is Nailer last time Fudcon was posted on Slashdot.
One of his suggestions was I should have contacted Red Hat and expressed my displeasure and since I didn't I had no right to bitch. Well its always a customers right to bith, I also told him that was obviously pointless to complaint to Red Hat since it was a strategic decision on Red Hat's part to ax their loyal customer base, those who got them where they were, to focus on charging an arm and a leg for Enterprise support to big corporations and to maximize their profit margin. Since they IPO'ed its pretty obvious they started caring more for what Wall Street analysts think than loyal customers and the developer community.
Nailer also suggested I should go begging to Red Hat Marketing/Sales and maybe they would give me a deal on an Enterprise upgrade, well again there is zero chance of me rewarding Red Hat with more money after they'd just unilaterally stuck a knife in my current subscription and forced me to abandon my current setup.
Nailer also gave me this never ending speil about how the Enterprise and Fedora marketing strategy made perfect sense and it was my problem for not seeing the wisdom in it. Feh!
Needless to say I just voted with my feet and migrated everything to Gentoo and never looked back. I wouldn't use Red Hat now if it was the last distribution on earth. Turns out I prefer compiling from source with Gentoo versus the old RPM mess anyway.
When Red Hat execs got rich on their IPO and slaved themselves to Wall Street they lost track of something really basic, yes they need to be profitable but they benefited mightily from open source developers and their original customer base and they made their IPO possible in the first place. Pissing off your user and developer community, and selling them out in favor of Wall Street analysts is an especially stupid strategy in the Linux world.
Red Hat completely trashed their brand and the loyalty they had for their distribution. They should have fine tuned out the problems in their strategy instead of introducing a huge discontinuity which pushed loyal customers to bailing on them.
@de_machina
Seth, you're a good guy. And indeed, all the RH engineers I know are good guys. RH spends an inordinate amount of money on the community, and has been a real focal point for the spread of Linux.
The problem is that several years after the avoidable screwup of claiming "we're walking away from home users and the desktop: go use Windows", I still can't walk into a random computer store, as far as I know, and buy a $20 boxed DVD with any kind of Red Hat Linux on it. This is bad. I can certainly walk into any computer store and buy a copy of Windows. One of the things that made us loyal to Red Hat (and I sysadmined a network of RH boxes for many years) was that we could always get the latest "supported" bits at the corner store without any download hassle---more importantly, we could always recommend the latest bits to newbies without any download hassle.
None of this is the engineers' fault. But it still sends a message to those, like me, who are trying to figure out what Linux distro to use, and that message is "we don't care about you unless you're either rich or have skills we can leverage." The cost of the boxed DVD should be trivial by comparison to the opportunity costs of sending this message, but RH management doesn't seem to see it. That in turn means that we have a hard time trusting RH management when they make us promises about what they're doing and why.
The short version: RH engineers---good, great even. RH management---seems to be out of touch with their customer relationships.
P.S. One thing that is the engineers' fault is this silly big-bang upgrade business. One of the reasons I'm now happily using Debian is that I never need to do the whole "back up the system in the middle of the night, do the upgrade, and pray" dance. Incremental upgrading rules, and for me is a precondition for using a Linux distro. Sure, the incremental upgrade means incremental breakage. But incremental breakage is just a lot easier to manage.