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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 hope this doesn't mean it will be based entirely on the user interface of vi.
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?
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.
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
I'm not sure it's a matter of it being bloated - more at just disorganized such that bloat is the end result. For example, Mepis and Ubuntu Linux each chime in at just one CD and it contains all of the essentials. An office suite, web browser, e-mail, and a GUI of some kind. With Fedora, you download four CDs worth of stuff, the majority of which the average user just plain doesn't need. But, Fedora is not organized such that the basic essentials are grouped on the first CD, making the other three extraneous. Instead, it's sprawled out evenly across four of them. The progress bar even shows that OpenOffice spans two CDs.
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.
Fedora Core 1 was RH10. It was simply a name change, nothing else. Same engineers still working on it. The distro is still rock solid and even easier to use then RH9. The only thing they did is decide to not ask for money for it anymore. Honestly, check out FC3 if you ever get the chance, you won't be disappointed.
Regards,
Steve
I hadn't noticed anything other than BETTER quality from the Fedora project compared to previous RedHat offerings. I am using a mix of RedHat 9 and Fedora Core 3 at home and at work and from where I stand FC3 is a HUGE jump past RH9. The hardware support is better, the apps are even better integrated than before and the functionality overall is extermely impressive. Examples:
1. The changes to Nautilus have made file management and access much easier with many conveniences like thumbnails, media previews, photo gallery views, etc... 2. The integration of remote mounts (SMB [ie. Windows file shares], FTP, SSH) is spectacular
3. USB device support is nearly flawless. I plugged in my brand new Epson Stylus R300 and just started printing. I plugged in a USB flash drive and it mounted and placed an icon on the desktop. I plugged in my Sony Mavica CD digital camera and it asked me about importing images into a gallery. The gallery also displayed all the inluded EXIF information. Just beautiful.
4. GIMP 2.0 takes some getting used to, but it looks promising (Just for the record I love GIMP 1.x)
5. LVM2 with kernel support at boot so that you no longer have to deal with the archaic notion of partitions
6. And of course... much improved performance on the same hardware. I have been using the same P4 at work for the past three years. RH9 was OK on it but admittedly a little slow with the default packages. I recompiled nearly everything and got performance more in line with Windows XP on the same box. But... with FC3, the same box didn't need any of the custom compiles and tweaks the RH9 did to get even better performance
Overall, I'd say Fedora has been a rousing success. I RedHat says they plan to put more effort into it, this can only mean greater things.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
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.
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
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
See http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140118&c id=11733413
;-)
The short version: inside RH engineering we find it very bizarre that people consider RH Linux and Fedora to be different. As engineers we're doing the same old stuff we've always been doing. We work on fedora deadlines, we polish and stabilize fedora releases, etc. To us, Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Now if you want somebody to feed you marketing spiel, you're not going to get that for Fedora, but most people here never needed that aspect of RHL
Just like RH Linux releases, some are better than others. Red Hat has often been the distro pushing forward large architectural changes (like the NPTL stuff, or more recently SELinux) that make Linux better, which is largely the reason for this variance. You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs, *grin*.
I think FC3 is a really good release, personally (compared to FC2, for sure, which sucked). *shrug*
-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
I guess I just want people to understand that we haven't been ill-behaved. We might be stupid, but not evil ;-)
;-) If you're interested in what we're doing, you can checek out my blog. I'm trying to slowly dump out a listing of all the different projects we're involved with. http://www.gnome.org/~seth
*nod*, I fully agree that dropping the boxed in-stores in-front-of-peoples-eyes version has been detrimental to awareness of RH (and Linux in general). It was profitable because when you have boxes in all the hundreds of thousands of stores, enough people do random buys (to see what all this linux stuff is about, etc) that even though the hit rate is small, you make real money off it.
The problem was all this better-than-free advertising also wasn't resulting in a lot of people using Linux. Home users who buy Linux in the store, by and large, end up running Windows at the end of the day. When you compound this with the versions in stores often being very old (and creating bad impressions of where Linux stands today...)...
I agree we'd be better off still marketing to home / small business users than ignoring them completely. But in terms of moving Linux from "something that sells because people are curious" to "something that sells because its important and useful to people", Linux has a lot more to offer enterprise customers right now. We want to be selling a product because its useful to people, not because its the latest craze!
RH's never been splashy about desktop, but we've always had a dedicated team working on it (from the early days of GNOME on...), and that team is currently fairly large by RH standards, more than 25 engineers. We've been notoriously bad at hyping our work, but we are doing lots of cool stuff
-Seth