Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

Blahbooboo3 writes "In a bid to attract a larger following among developers, Red Hat has spun off its Fedora open source project into a more independent foundation. As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support." From the article: "The proposed patents common, which mimics the Creative Commons licensing scheme for creative works including art and music, is designed to enable developers to exchange ideas with fewer concerns about patent infringement. and Red Hat's efforts to lobby for patent reform in the U.S. and Europe."

Comments

how do they make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Red Hat make money again. Seriously. Who are their big clients, what are the primary services they provide?

Re:how do they make money?

[Neil Blender]

How does Red Hat make money again. Seriously. Who are their big clients, what are the primary services they provide?

Dell ships computers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux which I assume they buy from Red Hat. In fact, I am posting from one right now. Dell is also nice enough to provide shrink a wrapped RHE disk set which we install on our IBM x-series servers.

Re:how do they make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh you know .. no one big.

Google
Toyota
Sony
Ameritrade

Re:how do they make money?

[birder]

Companies who want to use Linux but want a nice safe company to blame use Red Hat. $500-1750 per year per copy. They get around $25k a year from us. I've never once in 3 years called Red Hat for support but management is happy to pay that price to point the finger at someone to blame.

Re:how do they make money?

[tehshen]

They sell stuff. Specifically, RHEL, and support for it.

Re:how do they make money?

[ZephyrXero]

I really think Red Hat's focus is just about where it should be....You release Red Hat Personal (Fedora) for free and then you sell Red Hat Enterprise along with services to businesses...then use the same developers and code base.....I really wish someone in the Gentoo community would take this to heart.

Re:how do they make money?

[winkydink]

It's called Risk Management.

Re:how do they make money?

[njcoder]

Yeah that all sounds good until CentOS comes along and offers a free alternative built on the RHEL sources for those of us that don't want to spend thousands of dollars per server per year on every box running red hat whether we want support for it or not.

Re:how do they make money?

[superpulpsicle]

You must work for Redhat to think that way. The supposedly "better" enterprise version is totally inaccessible to the general audience unless you had a Redhat network account. The less stable version Fedora is freely available.

Now you tell me.... why should the average user run Redhat Fedora if it's not the best version the company has to offer?

Last good version of Redhat is Redhat 9. Good enough for corporations to run production, free enough for everyone.

Re:how do they make money?

[ZephyrXero]

Well that's their problem....they're charging too much.... If they charged a reasonable price, businesses would be more than willing to pay it for the services aspect. Does CentOS have a 24 hour tech support number?

Re:how do they make money?

[saleenS281]

Or rather, companies want someone to call when their in-house guru has a problem he/she can't solve. "Call redhat" is probably a bit more acceptable to a CEO than "well, I'll just make a post on the mailing list and we should get a fix in a month or two".

Re:how do they make money?

[lurch84]

Goes a little deeper than that, actually. When companies buy RHEL what they're buying is the skills of someone who knows more about the system then they do to keep it up and running no matter what. (This mostly applies to RHEL AS, but even to the other versions, albeit less so) It's that "well even *if* something breaks they'll fix it, and they'll fix it fast" promise that floats the bottom line

Re:how do they make money?

[ZephyrXero]

I was talking more about the theory than what they've actually done I guess.... I'm a gentoo user myself :P

Re:how do they make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

i think google uses a customized version?

Re:how do they make money?

[hackstraw]

I've never once in 3 years called Red Hat for support but management is happy to pay that price to point the finger at someone to blame.

I'm not trolling here, but what could you blame on RedHat?

Is there something that blaming RH could get a PHB out of trouble or something?

Re:how do they make money?

[njcoder]

I remember reading an interview with a google guy. There were using RedHat 7.3 I think. They had customized it quite a bit. As for the money they spent on RedHat according to the article it was something along the lines of "every time I go to Staples I might pick up a box".

Re:how do they make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

You haven't called them once? You are paying them $25,000 a year, and haven't called them once???

I've put in trouble calls multiple times, and for good reason. A lot of stuff on their system is broken in one way or another. Also, they backport a LOT of stuff, in a LOT of packages, when it comes time to patch your systems, and some organization somewhere is telling you that you need "Package a.7.8.3" and the newest package available on red hat is "7.8.1", it is far easier to put in a trouble call than it is to wade through changelogs.

Obviously you didn't buy Red Hat Satellite Server from them either... That thing is full of tiny annoying bugs.

Re:how do they make money?

[lcsjk]

I worked for a very large company a few years ago that built computers and other hardware for financial transactions (think ATM and Cash Register).

We sold hardware and software, but our main income was from the service department. With 24 hour repair or replace on site anywhere in the world (yes), companies were willing to pay to make sure they were always operating.

Our job as design engineers and software engineers was to make sure they never had a failure, so we were tasked with delivering the best quality available. If the service never had to make a service call, we made more money from the customer.

If you never had to call Red Hat for service, they made more profit. That's how they stay in business and keep investors happy.

Re:how do they make money?

[AHumbleOpinion]

I'm not trolling here, but what could you blame on RedHat?

Not getting a problem that is beyond the abilities of your in-house staff resolved in X number of hours. That's what RH is paid to do.

Is there something that blaming RH could get a PHB out of trouble or something?

Well, yes, he/she had a contingency plan to avoid the above.

Re:how do they make money?

[Tanktalus]

IBM

... Anyone want to bet smaller companies do, too? Say ... SCO?

Re:how do they make money?

[petermgreen]

were there any exceptions to anywhere in the world or could you be called out to a cash machine in say an antarctic base or something?

Re:how do they make money?

[treat]

If you never had to call Red Hat for service, they made more profit. That's how they stay in business and keep investors happy.

Well, I don't call Red Hat for service because they've never been able to help me. Their model seems to be to have support that is so bad, no one bothers to call. They know that the people calling support and the people making the decision to pay for support are ont usually the same people in any organization.

Re:how do they make money?

[treat]

Not getting a problem that is beyond the abilities of your in-house staff resolved in X number of hours. That's what RH is paid to do.

No they're not. The service agreement makes no guarantees that RedHat will fix anything for you. Just because you get to communicate with a support person doesn't mean they will be able to solve anything.

I have opened about a dozen cases with redhat support over the course of a couple years, for RHEL AS and ES systems. I have never been able to talk to someone competent.

If anyone knows how to get RH support to actually -fix- something, I'd love to hear about it.

Re:how do they make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dreamworks, on workstations used for film production, among other things.

Re:how do they make money?

[lcsjk]

Well, yes and no. When customer service is one of your main products, you have to offer the customer a variety of products to meet his needs. If the customer in the antarctic felt that his needs were so important that he needed 24 hour service, that could be offered, but not at the same price as service to the business located next door to the service center.

As an example, AAA charges more if you want your auto towed more than 5 miles.

Customer service costs, but like AAA, you cannot expect a customer to wait 20 minutes for a person to answer the phone.

Re:how do they make money?

[birder]

A little late, but this is it exactly. I haven't had to place a call but I know others that have and had 0 help, some tickets never replied to after sitting there days.

A Google seach is better.

Why use fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

What advantages does it have over other distros (Debian, por ejemplo)?

Re:Why use fedora?

[peterpi]

It feels like RedHat. That's enough for some people.

(*shrug* I dunno, that's only a guess. I use Debian Sarge)

Re:Why use fedora?

[Trigun]

Fedora Directory Server, for one.

Re:Why use fedora?

[mogrify]

Off the top of my head...

• Association with the Redhat brand, and therefore similar tools, look & feel, etc.
• More recently released packages (this can go both ways)
• Pretty GUI installer, if you like that kind of thing

Re:Why use fedora?

[hotdiggitydawg]

The brim keeps the rain off your face, whereas a Debian tin-foil skullcap doesn't.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

Off the top of my head...

No, on the top of your head, silly. It keeps the sun out of your eyes.

Re:Why use fedora?

[TheLinuxWarrior]

One reason to use it is when you have split environments.

Example: Production/Development/Test

You want the same look and feel/packages installed the same way on ALL servers, but you only want to pay for premium support for the prod servers. So use RHEL on those, and Fedora on Dev/Test to save money on licensing.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Homology]

What advantages does it have over other distros (Debian, por ejemplo)?

On one hand the Fedora is nothing more than a beta version of an upcomming commercial version from Redhat. You do all the testing, but on the other hand you get to download it for free. On the gripping hand you may use other BSD/distros that name a beta version a beta version and a release version a release version.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Chapium]

From my experience, things generally work out of the box. Little manipulation is needed to get working sound, video, X, etc.

Re:Why use fedora?

[m50d]

Brand recognition. To many people, red hat *is* linux.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it because unlike Mandrake/iva and Suse it doesn't directly have a pay-for version. Sure, there's RHEL, but you can get Centros instead. If I used Suse I'd just warez the pro version, which defeats the point of free software.

Debian - too old
Slack, *BSD - too scary
Ubuntu - Gnome
Kubuntu - Does this actually have enough people to make it sufficiently slick?
Gentoo - compiling is too slooow
Gobo - nice idea, but I'm better off learning the old-school ways of doing stuff for employability reasons :(

Re:Why use fedora?

[BlogPope]

You want the same look and feel/packages installed the same way on ALL servers, but you only want to pay for premium support for the prod servers.

Thats a really bad reason. Run Whitebox/ in you Dev environment, but run RHEL in your Test environment. What kind of QA environment runs a different OS than the Production Environment?

Fedora is QUITE different from RHEL.

Re:Why use fedora?

[burnin1965]

I'm not sure there is an advantage per se, I always explain to people that all distros come from the same code source so its hard to say one is better than another. (that ought fan some flames ;)

I can say that I use fedora extensively and find it to be very leading edge and yet functional. I use it in many incarnations from very minimal installs for firewalls, web servers, file servers, diskless cluster images, etc. all the way to my dual head desktop which I use for playing games, coding, image editing, etc. I am very satisfied with the Red Hat and Fedora releases to date.

I have a nephew who keeps jumping back and forth between debian and fedora whenever he has problems with either. I've never had the problems with fedora he has experienced but it may have to do with my familiarity with the distro. I did however try installing debian a couple months ago just to get an idea of what he was up to and it was not to my liking. It was going to take more tweaking and patching to get the box to an acceptable state than I had time for.

So IMO it comes down to trying out some distros and going with what you like. Just dismiss all the lame fanboy distro flaming.

burnin

Re:Why use fedora?

[StormyWeather]

I'm going to guess that it will allow Fedora to actually come out with stable releases rather than just being a nonstop test platform for Redhat.

Re:Why use fedora?

[WhiplashII]

People (well, slashdot people) really underestimate the value of brand recognition. Red Hat will make money because for a large class of people when they think Linux the first two names are Red Hat and IBM. Most people do not go looking for all the variants to find the best one (or the cheapest), they choose based on name recognition - because that is easier, and there is an underlying assumption that if everyone else is using it, they must be doing something right.

Red Hat and IBM own this space. (Of course, the sell to VERY different clients) Breaking in to an existing market is very difficult - and competing on price is a very bad idea, in general. (Among other things, it means that the clients you attract care only about price, which is the most difficult advantage to maintain!)

Re:Why use fedora?

[rainman_bc]

I'd use something like Whitebox Linux - it's a lot closer to RHEL than FC is nowadays IMO...

Re:Why use fedora?

[rainman_bc]

things generally work out of the box

Generally I'd agree with you, however ever tried getting a Realtek wireless card to work under FC? What a PITA! Had 2 use ndiswrapper, and every time there's a kernel update I have to hope ndiswrapper will still work... A few times there's been a kernel update and ndiswrapper failed me afterwards.

Granted it probably isn't any better than any other distro, but they made that nice notification area app that you can switch wireless networks nice and easily.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Mozk]

Best. Pun. Evar.

Re:Why use fedora?

[True Grit]

Ubuntu - Gnome

Kubuntu is just Ubuntu running KDE intead of GNOME by default. They aren't really separate entities. You turn Ubuntu into Kubuntu by just installing the Kubuntu KDE meta-package (which pulls in all of KDE). However, you can just as easily run both or neither. Ubuntu is based on Debian, you have access to the same breadth of software that Debian has, including other window managers. The only catch is you have to remove some of the Ubuntu specific meta-packages to get more flexibility, but its easy for anyone already familiar with Debian's package management, and who understands that Ubuntu is just a particular "flavor" of Debian. I'm running "Ubuntu" with a stripped-down KDE and no GNOME for example, it technically isn't Kubuntu because not all KDE packages, and none of the Kubuntu specific meta-packages, are installed (and for that matter not all the Ubuntu specific meta-packages are installed either), but the effect is basically the same.

Kubuntu - Does this actually have enough people to make it sufficiently slick?

I have no idea what you mean by "sufficiently slick". :) KDE in Ubuntu is being supported by its users, so as Ubuntu's userbase grows so will Kubuntu's userbase, and therefore its "slickness". Since KDE support is already good for Debian itself, and Kubuntu is just working off that already good support, I'd say there is already enough users and devs to make it a viable alternative to the GNOME default in Ubuntu.

Re:Why use fedora?

[guacamole]

Compared to Debian fossilized^H^H^H^Hstable, Fedora has a much lively release cycle, every 6 to 8 months so that you can enjoy very recent versions of many popular packages and improved hardware support. Debian on the other hand as a lot more packages and you have many alternatives to choose from (e.g. Don't want to use cups? Try LPRng. Don't want to use postfix? Then try exim. Want to use some obscure scheme interpreter? It's probably there).

Re:Why use fedora?

[IamTheRealMike]

It's a slick, integrated desktop with lots of security features like ExecShield and SELinux.

That alone is reason enough for me.

Re:Why use fedora?

[TheLinuxWarrior]

First of all, I didn't say I do it. I said that may be one reason to do it if you're so inclined. The persons question was why, not what do you use.

Second, Fedora is not QUITE different from RHEL. It's quite different from Debian or Gentoo or Slackware.

If you want Red Hat without the Red Hat, use CentOS. Whitebox IMO is way too far behind to be a viable platform.

Re:Why use fedora?

[rayvd]

Actually what you really want to use is CentOS. WBEL development seemed to stagnate and its updates came out much slower.

We tend to use CentOS in dev environments and RHES in "live" environments although there's not much of a difference between the two except that the suits feel better about things if they spend some money.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess for someone used to any major distro, it doesn't make much sense to change to another. The more you use a distro, the more you learn, the more it would take to learn another.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Compenguin]

RPMs/SRPMs

I was a former redhat user. It was so much easier to package and and re-package RPMs than it is to package ad repackage debs on my new debian baased distro (Ubuntu).

Re:Why use fedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

None until they get over that retarded ass policy of "no mp3 decoders".

Hopefully this new change will fix that stupidity.

Re:Why use fedora?

[Lord Kestrel]

That's how it is here. RedHat/Fedora = Linux to most.

Re:Why use fedora?

[jhoger]

False comparison... if you want to compare apples to apples, you should really be comparing Fedora to Sid (Debian Unstable).

Contrary to popular opinion, Debian Unstable is very, very stable. I'd like stable to release more often, but look at what we get in return: more packages, more architectures, and more freedom.

-- John.

Re:Why use fedora?

[guacamole]

What do you mean by "very, very stable"? Debian unstable is a development version. New packages are being uploaded all the time. Therefore it is unstable by definition because it's changing all the time.

Re:Why use fedora?

[jhoger]

Well I mean stable in the user's sense: the popular apps are not buggy and are usable. Unstable to a user means breakage. In the years I've been using Debian, I haven't seen much of that.

Debian has a lot of packages. The least used ones are often crappy, but no matter how old and crufty a version you use of such a package, it's still going to be crappy. So stable/unstable is irrelevant there.

But having the distribution that you should probably use on the desktop being called "unstable" gives users the wrong impression.

As far as the definition of "stable" meaning that you have a fixed, unchanging set of packages that you just get bugfix releases for, is of very little interest to joe user.

The usual criticism of Debian is that it is old. Well, it's only old for the people that value a, well, old (but maintained) version (the stable one). For everyone else the exact set of packages that are in Debian at any time is of very little importance. What's important to them is that maintained versions of the apps they use be available to them. The popular ones are available in Sid and prepackaged with all dependencies correct.

-- John.

Re:Why use fedora?

[jroysdon]

Not true. Fedora Test releases are like Betas. Actual Fedora releases are rather solid. Specifically, FC2 & FC3, which I've used exclusively on all my servers, home systems, and work laptops in the last year.

fc release schedule

Re:Why use fedora?

[KiloByte]

While breakages in unstable happen, it's still about as stable as Red Hat releases if not better. This means, you need to know how to fix things by hand, but it's in generally good shape. The maintainers hardly ever put useless/alpha software in unstable -- and in fact, even beta packages are rare and clearly marked as such.

For the "unstable to an user" version, try experimental. These packages can be dangerous and sometimes need to be rolled back by hand -- but, strangely enough, right at this moment experimental seems to be in as good shape as unstable. I've put my old broken-mobo-but-still-usually-working box to the current dist-upgrade -texperimental state and it's working just fine. Hell, it even stopped failing (it used to have hardware issues every a few hours when running unstable) -- but this may be a coincidence :p

As of yet...

[ImaLamer]

I see nothing on Redhat's site or the Fedora site about this.

Wouldn't that be the first place I should be looking?

Re:As of yet...

[DrinkingIllini]

From the article...

At the Red Hat Summit, Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel at Red Hat, is expected to announce the creation of the Fedora Foundation and the Software Patent Commons.

That is why there isn't anything on the websites yet, it hasn't been "officially" announced.

Re:As of yet...

[brontus3927]

This was reported on CRN this morning, and apparently InfoWeek. Google News lists articles of this from Business Wire, GeekCoffee, and eWeek, among others.

Re:As of yet...

[brontus3927]

Oops, I meant to link to those articles.

CRN, GeekCoffee, Business Wire, and eWeek

Re:As of yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

what a way to karma whore... "oh, i forgot the useful links, so i'll post again, and get more mod points!"

Re:As of yet...

[yahwotqa]

As if this karma bullshit was actually good for something. He just forgot the links. Get it?

Ubuntu ?

[anandpur]

Is this because ubuntu is gaining popularity and large number of GNOME developres are in ubuntu camp?

Re:Ubuntu ?

[LnxAddct]

Fedora's growth rate is 3 times that of the next fastest growing distro, Gentoo. In a little under 2 years Fedora has over 400,000 live servers on the net (yes a few were prior RH servers, but estimates show only about 10,000 - 20,000). Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers. Fedora is overtaking Suse (they are about 25,000 servers apart). The two biggest distros are Red Hat Enterprise with 1.6 million servers and Debian with 760,000 servers. Most of the Ubuntu users are previous Debian testing and unstable users and previous Gentoo users. Red Hat is currently by far the biggest supporter of Gnome, the only company that ever claim close was Ximian. Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Gnome including developers, HIGs, user studies, quality assurance, and general advancement of the free desktop. Ubuntu is not even in the same ballpark as Fedora, its users just make a lot of noise and its founder has a lot of money for PR.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

uwhatu?

oh.

never mind, i really don't care to hear about the latest flavor of the month. again.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Uruk]

Very unlikely. It probably has much more to do with Red Hat's move into the server market - they don't seem too concerned with desktop linux because that's really not how they make their money. The things they do in the server market you might be able to attribute to reactions to whatever else is happening with other vendors, but they just don't focus on Fedora anymore, that's why they're letting it go.

Giving more control to an external foundation is a good thing. I hope the developers run with it.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[wpmartin]

Uh no.
I am a previous Fedora user and if you watched the Ubuntu mailing list you would see there are a fair amount of Fedora Converts. That being said I use Fedora at work because it is closest to Red Hat and I admin REL boxes. But at home I use Ubuntu because one it at least feels fast but I suspect it is faster. Redhat tends to have a fair amount of bloat to it. Also look at distrowatch.org, notice what is on top? Ubuntu. This isn't about PR this is about a community built on listening to its users and trying to build a product for those users. Something that in my opinion Redhat does not do. I have used both Fedora and Ubuntu and both are good distros, have you used Ubuntu? I doubt it.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they are just trying to improve things.
They have made other moves like this in the past.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

tat's funny.

when RH flushed all us who made them what they are down the toilet by abandoning us most of us switched to Mandrake or SuSE.

microsoft has the most servers on the net if you count all the wannabe's running server 2000 or 2003 at home because they were given a warez copy.

I STILL will never allow another RH or fedora product in this company as long as I work here. and I know I am not alone.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Do you have any sources for those numbers? Just curious.

Your numbers talk about servers for Fedora, Debian, SuSE and RedHat; but my experience is that Ubuntu & Gentoo is mostly used for workstations (including individual development servers), RHEL & Debian is mostly production & shared development servers, Fedora & SuSE are popular in both places-- so you're almost comparing apples to oranges to bananas.

Most of the Ubuntu users are previous Debian testing and unstable users and previous Gentoo users.

Not sure that I agree. While I'm sure that Ubuntu is attracting many Debian Testing & Unstable users, it's also attracting many new users from all other areas.

I know a number of people who are starting to use Ubuntu, and none of us were big fans of Debian at all because it's always so far behind the times & hard to use. We're especially not big fans of Debian Testing or Stable, because they are hard to use and buggy.

Ubuntu looks & feels very different from Debian, but it's

Re:Ubuntu ?

[LDoggg_]

FUD

How did they abandon anyone? By no longer putting a RH desktop distro on store shelves? It wasn't profitable. They still have a free distro (fedora) that they put lots of R&D into.
What's the problem?

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you talking about servers? Ubuntu and Fedora are both primarily aimed at the desktop.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Uber Banker]

There is a difference between a growth rate and an amount grown. You said growth rate but only quoted numbers.

If A grows faster than B, it will eventually over take it (given this faster growth is sustained), while B can still grow by a greater absolute amount than A.

Also, do you have a source for those numbers?

Re:Ubuntu ?

[burnin1965]

I can't speak for Ubuntu, but Fedora is designed to work in many applications. The install GUI allows you to choose from various workstation, server, and minimal installations. I don't normally use the GUI installer when building minimal boxes, I like to make a custom kickstart file in some cases, but all options are there.

burnin

Re:Ubuntu ?

[chrisbtoo]

Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers

There would be a load more than that, but we're all still waiting for it to finish compiling.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow up people! You seem to love debian and hate fedora without any good reason.

Fedora is not beta quality! It is actually very stable distribution. Once the release has been made there will be only bug fix updates.

Fedora contains newer packages because new releases are made more often. This makes fedora more secure as new software has less bugs than old software.

The quality of the distro comes from the quality of the upstream packages. You seem to forget this fact. It is not the distro developers who write the software. It is upstream developers. And this is a fact: the latest release of a software is more stable than old one.

The only difference between fedora release and debian stable is that fedora actually upgrades the software if a newer version has been released. Debian guys backport the fixes. They think this makes the software more stable. The reality is different. Upstream upgrade is always more stable than backported one.

Debian guys reason the backporting by saying this way they don't break anything. Actually fedora's upgrades have never broke anything. Why? Because they use common sense. They will backport if the upstream version is not compatible. But if it is, they will not waste precious development time applying patches.

The policy of not backporting when it is not needed saves huge amounts of development time. This means fedora can release stable releases more often. Which in turn makes fedora more stable distro than debian because fedora has newer packages.

When you talk about debian stable and say it is so stable because it does not live you seem to forget that fedora lives only when it is necessary - only when there are bugfixes. And if you want to have older snapshot (a release is a snapshot - the older the snapshot, the less fixes it gets usually) for extreme stability (which in turn makes your box more vulnerable to security issues, but I know this is sometimes what you want - but in many cases a newer box is actually a better choise), like debian's stable: you can always use a bit older fedora release and get bug fix updates from the fedora legacy project (or use Redhat Enterprise, but I wanted to note you about the open source alternative). I think the combination of older fedora release and fedora legacy makes your box even more stable than debian because you're software is then newer but you still get all fixes.

What do I think about debian? I use it every day (yes, I use also debian) and from exprerience I can say that the deb format is not better than rpm (this is often how debian guys reason their distro is better). The packaging policy sucs! They use the default switches even when they know it won't work (we have to use source compiled versions because of this) - fedora uses combination which ensures the package is usable. The whole idea of only accepting critical fixes is stupid. If there is a very serious bug which does not open a security whole but makes the software unusable, debian will not allow to release a fix! Stupid!

If you have never used fedora, don't say anything about it! Try it seriously and put your missbelieves aside and you will notice that it is a very mature distribution. I know Red Hat Linux used to be different. But now it is called Fedora and it is fully open source. The whole policy of the distribution changed when the fedora project was started. The project produces the bleeding edge linux distribution which does things right.

In simple terms: fedora is debian done right!

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Figures for servers (all servers, servers visible via the internet?) ignore machines sold by Walmart and others as home user or desktop machines with Xandros or Linspire installed. It also ignores things like big corporate Linux desktop roll outs, or the Sun Java Desktop (SuSE with a Sun branding) being rolled out in China. In fact the latter deal alone, if realised and continued in full, would make Sun just about the biggest Linux distributor in the world.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is quoting a survey that did NOT include Ubunutu, as discussed previously.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat is currently by far the biggest supporter of Gnome, the only company that ever claim close was Ximian. Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Gnome including developers, HIGs, user studies, quality assurance, and general advancement of the free desktop.

Um, don't forget Sun, and a number of other projects and companies, my friend.

http://foundation.gnome.org/about/

Re:Ubuntu ?

[WorLord]

Ubuntu is not even in the same ballpark as Fedora

On this, we agree; Ubuntu actually works and doesn't take a million years and three CD's to install.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, how does this comment:

> when RH flushed all us who made them what they are
> down the toilet by abandoning us most of us
> switched to Mandrake or SuSE.

get attributed to Debian? I believe you've picked the wrong fan-boy to critize.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[LnxAddct]

Here's one of the sources. Sorry about that, I cited it in some other posts but forgot in this one :) The other sources were places like newsforge, but the exact links I can't seem to find right now. My intent was not to start any kind of flame war, just to note an observation. The misinformation spread on slashdot recently is ridiculous and I'm just trying to counter it a bit. Whether or not someone agrees with me though I guess is a different story.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Ubuntu ?

[LnxAddct]

I believe Ubuntu was included with Debian.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If true it means Ubuntu's growth is hugely obscured, especially considering how many people switched from Debian. Either way, the stats you cite provide no useful information on Ubuntu v Fedore. FUD.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a current Ubuntu and Fedora3 user on two side by side systems.

Their similarities vastly outweigh their differences.

I've run fedora from FC1 and RH from RH 7.1 before that, and Ubuntu from the Warty release.

I run Synaptic on both systems, and add my choice of packages from Freshrpms.net and its associated rpm archives to the FC3 system, and add packages from the Ubuntu planet archive.

From my viewpoint, both systems improve substantially with each release. Long may the competition continue.

Shoka

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh yes.
Of course you're going to see Fedora users at the top of the convert list of an UBUNTU mailing list. If the biggest distro out there was Slack, you'd see slack users converting the most. That's just the way it works. There's always people converting from every distro, you're going to see the most from the most popular one. Statistics..

Distrowatch means absolutely shit too. I, for one, have NEVER downloaded a distro from distro watch, nor do I know anyone that has. If all distro downloads were forced to go through them, then maybe their stats would have some meaning, but as it is, they don't.

Just because you might not like Fedora doesn't invalidate the grandparent poster's point.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[eloki]

Come on, Ubuntu is based on snapshots of Debian unstable. Debian testing isn't particularly buggy compared to other distros. The main downside for a user's point of view is that it's a moving target that constantly changes. The upside from a user's point of view is probably also that it's a moving target that constantly updates...

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu vs. FUDora, I presume?

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, you're right! :)

Now I should probably say something about SuSE as that was one of the distros he was saying to be better. (Although he seems to be more like angry for Red Hat dropping support for the Red Hat Linux product. Well, I don't think they really did that as they did support the old releases. They just didn't make another one and said that customers should move to Enterprise Linux if they need support. What's wrong with that move really? I don't get it. Very few of us really need the support - and if need, there is RHEL.)

If I say something about SuSE, I'd say I hate the poor quality of their packages. Just get php-pear for example. It does not set the pear dir config setting into php.ini! And this was just one example of many. I think I don't have to say more...

Fedora is great. The idea of it is just perfect for me (open source, great packaging policy, mature development/testing style). You cannot really critize it with reason. That's why you hear comments like "Red Crap" etc.

Your username is oddly appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should RTFA

what about KDE?

[Karma Sucks]

Will this finally put KDE development on an equal footing with GNOME in Fedora? Will KDE improvements from KDE developers to the RPM packages in Fedora now be accepted?

Right now KDE suffers a big disadvantage vs GNOME. It is held crippled by "desktop" rules but not in the same way as GNOME. The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream like PlastiK defaults.

So, I say again, will this be an opportunity for true improvement of KDE in Fedora? And if not, why not?

Re:what about KDE?

[MountainMan101]

Good point. I have never had much experience with KDE - mainly because I've always used RH or FC and GNOME is much better represented.

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be picky.... but when you say the last line of your post, aren't your really asking? :P

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to be picky ... but what does " aren't your really asking? " mean?

Re:what about KDE?

[brontus3927]

Most of my Linux experience was with Mandrake, and even that uses GNOME by default. I've always prefered the Look&Feel of KDE, though. Having said that, I've yet to use a K app that I liked.

Re:what about KDE?

[ArsonSmith]

I know what you mean. I wish the look and feel guys from KDE would get together with the application guys of gnome. work together rather than seperately. right now we have competeing desktops that both suck. Picking and choosing and combining efforts would work much better.

Re:what about KDE?

[Erwos]

"The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream"

I have no idea what you're talking about. Fedora Core always includes an updated version of KDE. FC4 has KDE 3.4.0, for instance.

-Erwos

Re:what about KDE?

[Jason Earl]

My guess is that Red Hat will primarily be paying Red Hat engineers to work on Gnome, and I would also bet that the folks that work on FC will continue to work on making the Gnome and KDE stuff look similar. In other words the KDE stuff will continue to look like the Gnome stuff.

For this to change then the KDE community would have to get a lot more involved with the FC community. In fact, they would have to get enough involved that they could change the course of the distribution. I am not part of the FC community, but I have watched enough Free Software projects that I would be very surprised if this signalled a big change. Red Hat is doing all it can to make Fedora as independent as possible, but it still is going to be providing the bulk of the actual development time.

Re:what about KDE?

[Karma Sucks]

Which part of PlastiK defaults did you not understand? KDE in FC is using an OUTDATED Redhat theme compared to GNOME and they don't even have the decency to change KDE back to PlasTiK.

Re:what about KDE?

[SirTalon42]

Fedora doesn't release any updates for KDE after it (Fedora) is released. I use KDE-RedHat for all my KDE upgrading needs (and I get full mpeg support then).

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake does not use KDE by default, at least not in the more than 5 years that I have been using it on my workstation. However, it does include gnome packages that do work well, but I prefer to stay with the default KDE setup.

Re:what about KDE?

[brontus3927]

Exactly. I install both KDE and GNOME. That way I can use KDE for WM tasks and have all th gt libraries to run GNOME and other gtk apps. Except for poorly written/designed apps, the KDE Look&Feel renders GNOME apps consitently with the KDE fare.

Re:what about KDE?

[Erwos]

That's ONE THING. Your post made it sound like they never touched KDE. That's flatly untrue.

It's not like you can't use Plastik, either. I mean, listen to yourself: you're whining they didn't use your favorite theme. Get over it.

-Erwos

Re:what about KDE?

[brontus3927]

Yeah, yeah, I already acknowledged the mistake. Maybe I should reinstall my OS tonite just to keep myself on my toes.

Re:what about KDE?

[Karma Sucks]

Hey jackass, I'm SAYING Fedora is neglecting KDE compared to GNOME which is clearly true given that KDE is using an OLD and OUTDATED Redhat theme compared to the new theme GNOME is using, not to mention like others have said no OOo-KDE, no GTK-Qt, no KDE configuration tools for Fedora, and I'm ASKING whether this change will allow KDE lovers to take matters into their own hands.

Get it, now?

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAICT, you're right--he's just whining about a theme. However, RedHat/Fedora has historically had some KDE problems that are very real.

Such as:
When you use KDE, you still get GDM (not KDM). This means you can't do things like SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER easily. Before you respond with "Why would you want to shut down...?" I use a laptop. Shutting down from the GUI is a nice feature a modern OS should have.
Icon themes have always in my experience been partially screwed up in KDE. The main pointers work, but random other ones are broken, and I have no clue how to fix it (other than install SuSE)
Admin tools use RTL (Gnome) button order, a glaring inconsistency which always makes using KDE on Fedora a bit hokey-feeling.

But changing themes? Who the hell cares? I don't even like Plastic's window decorations (hello Luna ripoff!) Most users change the defaults anyway.

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. I was not trying to be an ass and I felt bad because I saw your post acknowledging the mistake after I posted. It seems like I'm wrong a lot so I know how you feel.

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

waaaahhhhh! BooooooHooooooo!

Sheesh, what a crybaby!

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations on the new baby, Havoc!

Re:what about KDE?

[Nasarius]

no GTK-Qt

To be fair, gtk-qt is still quite buggy, and I don't blame distros for not touching it yet. Besides the graphical glitches, it segfaults on FreeBSD when running a GTK app over remote X.

If you like KDE, you're probably better off with SuSE, or better yet a distro like Gentoo where the maintainers don't pick a default desktop for you.

Re:what about KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not. KDE has always been the also-ran as far as Red Hat and Fedora go, and that's unlikely to change -- which is one of the major reasons I don't use Fedora anymore.

Re:what about KDE?

[eth4n0L]

I generally feel the same way; the only KDE app I use on a regular basis is k3b. However, I find that app to be so useful for making mix cd's that it justifies installing KDE in and of itself. Trying to make mix cd's from the command line is a real pain; with k3b I can just drag & drop automagically from a Rhythmbox playlist.

Re:what about KDE?

[rdieter]

Will this finally put KDE development on an equal footing with GNOME in Fedora? Will KDE improvements from KDE developers to the RPM packages in Fedora now be accepted? Right now KDE suffers a big disadvantage vs GNOME

Yours is a a common perception, unfortunately, but, IMO, pure FUD. Of course KDE improvements are accepted. I see no "big disadvantages" vs GNOME (if you do, enumerate them please, I'm curious).

I founded the kde-redhat project, and I can say without reservation that fedora/redhat has always (at least in the last 3-4 years) been very open to suggestions and improvements in KDE.

Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[georgep77]

It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions. As in the commercial world open source projects live and die by "mindshare" almost as much as technical merit. The spinning off of Fedora sounds like an attempt to recapture some lost mindshare.

Cheers,
_GP_

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[AKAImBatman]

There's just one thing I don't understand about Ubuntu: Why are they shipping free(!) CDs to people? That has to cost them a fortune, especically for international shipments! I love a free gift as much as the next guy, but the thought of getting a no-cost Ubuntu CD without the company ever seeing a return makes me feel kind of cheap.

Anyone have the scoop?

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[LnxAddct]

Read this. Ubuntu is nothing but a bunch of previous debian unstable and testing users who migrated. Fedora is one of the leading distros and hs been for a while. It's gained that much popularity and it isn't even 2 years old yet. If you've never used Fedora then you wouldn't understand how great and seamless it all works together. In fact, Ubuntu uses Gnome and most of Gnome was coded by Red Hat and Fedora engineers (along with a significant chunk from Ximian too) and they continue to advance it to this very day. Ubuntu is not competition for Fedora, Ubuntu is just some Debian users shifting over.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[93 Escort Wagon]

" It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions."

I don't think so. The people who go for Ubuntu seem to be in large part the same people who went for Gentoo a year ago (and were making these sorts of comments then as well) - and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006. They're a very vocal group - especially in places like /. - but the actual installed base is pretty inconsequential.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[jav1231]

I would hardly consider Fedora such a lofty distro. I refuse to use it. I'm one of those who was shafted by RH when they dumped their desktop Linux, this despite actually making money on it. OTOH, I wouldn't consider Ubuntu a leading distro and certainly not one making the likes of RH, SuSE/Novell, or even Gentoo quake in their shoes. I use CentOS currently, because I get RHEL and don't have to give those a$$holes my money. See I offered RH my money and they basically said without an Inc. after my name I could piss-off.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who started Ubuntu has:

a) bucketloads of dosh
b) a will to change the world
c) a point of view that freedom of access to information is valuable
d) a point of view that free software is a good way of giving back to the community
e) a point of view (which meshes well with the free software community) that software should be [vry en nie net gratis nie]

His money. His decision. Nice linux. I have no complaints.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. I agree. Another thing that rankled me about Red Hat was Alan Coxand his mindless censoring of security changes made in the Linux kernel due
to the DMCA. I refuse to use a Linux distro that is based in the US for this reason.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

The business model seems to be providing technical support, and the CDs help spreading the distribution and make it common. And it works. I've several friends who've switched because they got those CDs, two of them permanently (well, we'll see if it lasts) from being Windows users to 100% Ubuntu.

Also, I read an interview somewhere with the very rich guy who sponsors the whole thing where he said that he hopes he can eventually make money of it this way, but if not, he doesn't mind spending some of his money for a good cause. Apparently he's from South Africa(?), and feels that the world, especially the poorer part, needs a cheap, open and reliable alternative. This is the same guy who had enough money to buy himself a spacetrip, so I guess he can afford it.

Sorry, I'm not sure on the exact details, but I'm sure that interview can be found on google if you want to.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[digidave]

You forget that Ubuntu has converted a lot of former Debian users because they have a similar Free Software philosophy to Debian, employ a lot of old Debian programmers and the OS works the same way.

It's also worth noting that people use Ubuntu because it beats the pants off Fedora for ease of use. Gentoo or any other distro-of-the-month never did that, they only offered gimmicks. Simple Debian isn't a gimmick.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that uwhatu?'s success is basically smoke flying up people's butts.

you have to step throught the tiny door that leads to uwhatu?'s teensy wheensy world and once inside, sure you'll find the fan club singing the praises.

bah. whatever.

my anecdotal evidence (everyone else is giving it)from lug meetings, forums, lists, contracting and usenet is this:

uwhatu?

p.s. the "Fedora sounds like an attempt to recapture some lost mindshar" part is true. at least your head is not totally in the clouds.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Skeezix]

I think you are very very wrong about that. The people I see switching to Ubuntu in droves are the people who used to run distributions like Fedora, Debian proper, and Mandrake. And yeah, I would include Gentoo in the mix. But it's not users looking for the new distro-of-the-month. It's users looking for the best all around distribution that is community driven.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK. Whatever. Part of the reason people are in love with Ubuntu is simply Debian. Debian is BY FAR the most stable of the distros, and the most well thought out. Ubunti offers the stability of Debian with the ease of Mandriva. Hell, I thought installing Ubuntu was an anti-climax. The only thing easier is Mac OS X.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[wpmartin]

Oh wait you are talking server...I thought Fedora was aimed at desktop. If we are talking server Ubuntu doesn't compare at present, but if you are talking desktop. Well then Fedora isn't even close. Oh by the way have you ever used Ubuntu? I use both, Fedora at work Ubuntu at home. I prefer Ubuntu but we use REL at work so Fedora is closer to that toolswise. And if your answer to ever using Ubuntu is no please don't point at server stats to say Ubuntu is no good.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[AKAImBatman]

The business model seems to be providing technical support, and the CDs help spreading the distribution and make it common.

This sort of model always confused me. Shouldn't software developers be attempting to reduce support calls by making things "Just Work(TM)"? In theory, any company who follows this business model will either:

a) Obfuscate their software (see: JBoss)
b) Work themselves out of profits

It's just weird.

Also, I read an interview somewhere with the very rich guy who sponsors the whole thing where he said that he hopes he can eventually make money of it this way,

Interesting. In any case, if I go for the CDs I'll probably donate so that I don't feel so darn cheap. ;-)

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[dtfinch]

If you wanted to pay more, they do accept donations.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[caluml]

I don't think it's the distro du jour effect. Not for me anyway. Gentoo met all my important criteria in a single distro.

• No need to boot off a CD to upgrade the distro
• No need to download RPMs/packages manually
• Wide choice of packages
• Modern, and up to date
• One command install
• Packages compiled with exactly the right options for my systems.
• Stable and secure.
• Lots of archs supported.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

Making cars "just work" doesn't seem to have put mechanics out of business.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[stinky wizzleteats]

1995 called. They want their (NT) inevitability argument back.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[jav1231]

I didn't realize that. I don't see how this could hold up given the GPL but who knows.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so. The people who go for Ubuntu seem to be in large part the same people who went for Gentoo a year ago (and were making these sorts of comments then as well) - and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006.

Not really. I had been with Libranet for three years as a desktop distro, while trying various other distros in Vmware (such as FC 3, Suse 9.2 and even Xandros), and I made the switch to Ubuntu earlier this year. The docs are off the scale with respect to getting up and running as an effective desktop distro. The only other distro I've really liked has been Mepis.

They're a very vocal group - especially in places like /. - but the actual installed base is pretty inconsequential.

Yeah, I hear a lot of this, mostly with no real numbers to back it up (as to how inconsequential Ubuntu is). Ubuntu is not going for open source server OS of the year (see FreeBSD or OpenBSD for that), but it IS a very nice desktop OS. I work with Redhat AS 3 and 4 at work, and I'm not impressed. It damned near makes me want to try Solaris 10 on the x86 in fact.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[pyros]

OP didn't say Ubuntu was no good (at least that's not what I read), just that the current install base was primarily people who used to use Debian testing or unstable. I've tried Ubuntu a couple of times, and I have to say I strongly prefer the config/admin tools in Fedora to any other distro (including Mandrake and Suse). There are two things I like about Ubuntu: they include the DSDT in initrd kernel patch so you don't have to rebuild your kernel to fix broken laptop ACPI; and the use of apt. The second point is moot because You can use apt on FC, but Yum is just as good (for my needs). Also, I prefer rpm to dpkg anyday. Regarding the ACPI thing, Suse and Mandrake also include that kernel patch by default, so Red Hat is really out in the cold on that one, but it turns out that ACPI on my laptop still doesn't work even after cleaning up the DSDT. So that leaves me with no incentive to run Ubuntu. In fact, it leaves me with no incentive to run Linux on that machine, so I don't. But if I did, it would be FC.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[wolf31o2]

I absolutely love hearing this argument. Do you know why Debian is so stable? It is because the software that they choose to include has been tested and patched and tested and tested again. That is one of the main reasons that it is considered by many to be stale. Ubuntu, on the other hand, can be no more stable than Gentoo or Fedora, since it uses very fresh and new packages, just like Gentoo or Fedora.

Just because it is based on Debian does not Debian make. I could easily make a "Debian-based" distribution that used apt but pulled stuff straight from CVS HEAD on a ton of projects and it would be anything but stable. Does that mean Debian is unstable? We are talking about a "Debian-based" distribution.

Ubuntu is no more "simply Debian" than Knoppix or MEPIS or Morphix. They are all based on Debian and use Debian's package manager, but that doesn't make them Debian. The sooner that people start to realize this, the sooner that people will start to look at these distributions as entities of their own, and not as Debian. I mean, how many people think that Mandriva or Novell/SuSE are Red Hat because they use RPM?

The truth is that a lot of people like Ubuntu. It has little to nothing to do with it being based on Debian, other than people already know how to use its package manager.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[yahwotqa]

So, some of those emails about african guys needing to transfer huge sums of money was actually real?

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, sir. You have a point.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Maybe "technical support" is misleading? I can think of lots of other things to do apart from fixing bugs and problems, although I suspect providing some kind of commercial grade guarantees that any problems will be fixed would be a valid business model too, at least for some companies.

For instance, you could very well charge money for developing certain, possibly quite specialized, features for the distribution that is otherwise lower on the general priorities list. Or for helping to migrate to it from other platforms. I'm sure there are other possibilities, but I am only guessing. I do think that larger companies have little problem paying for experts to do the grunt work, they just want something that works - like you say - whichever platform they have chosen.

It also works the other way around, which is why many companies do put money or effort into projects that are free and open: they get a product they can use themselves, which might be better than anything else, and they get a say in how it will work. Many, many products out there that are shrinkwrapped may not do what companies want, and maybe they never will - as well as the risk that the product may be gone one day with no way to go forward without switching completely.

Lets say a company builds products around Apache, PHP and MySQL - or whatever - if they have specialized needs enough, or even just make big enough business on it, it might make perfect sense to help make those products as good as possible. Maybe the guy(s) behind Canonical only really need a very good Linux distribution, for whatever reason.

I don't claim to know how these people reason, I have a bit of a hard time seeing how the service model should work at times myself. But it seems that others do believe in it, and it's not only people who go bankrupt. ;-)

I went for the CDs. I pay for them by giving them to friends and letting them try it out. After all, that is what they want me to do with them. Although, I might donate a bit too, it seems they need money for their servers at the moment...

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

So, some of those emails about african guys needing to transfer huge sums of money was actually real?

Well, if the Ubuntu guys just were the first ones to actually answer one, a few people *will* be slapping their foreheads pretty hard for deleting them instead. =)

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

I started with Slackware in 1994, switched to Redhat in 1995, went to Fedora when FC1 came out, and then switched to Ubuntu in 2004. I now use Ubuntu at work and at home. I like Ubuntu and plan to stay with it for awhile.

Reasons: I filed bugzilla reports in redhat/fedora which were just ignored by redhat developers. With ubuntu my bug reports received excellent attention.
Updating redhat/fedora became a real pain, frequent problems with up2date and yum. Apt-get and synaptic with the ubuntu repositories is fantastic. Fedora became too bleeding edge with frequent breakage. Finally there was the Fedora bloat, 3 install CD's, 4 install CD's, 5 install CD's. I really like the 1 CD (not even full!) approach that Ubuntu uses.
I also really like the community approach of Ubuntu, I have edited some of the ubuntu wiki pages, something that was not possible with Redhat/fedora.
Having said why I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu I must also say that Redhat is an excellent company, a very good friend for linux and open source software. I hope that Fedora continues to do well.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Only on the left can stifling religious speech be considered an act of "Religious Tolerance."

I don't go into your church and demand you recite this and that, so fuck you and your football game prayers, and keep them the hell out of my schools.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[4of12]

and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006.

Hey, I'm an Ubuntu user for about 5 months now, but I really interested in trying out this du jour Linux!

Do you know where I can download their distro?

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[muckdog]

Gentoo sure as hell isn't a gimmic. Compile from source is what a lot of people want and I find gentoo much easier to keep up to date than any package distro.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Random BedHead Ed]

I think this is very likely true. I was a loyal Red Hat / Fedora user for a long time, and even hold an RHCE certification. But Ubuntu really impressed me, and I'm using it as my desktop at both home and work. It has quick access to a repository of thousands of packages (including Microsoft fonts, Win32 codecs and more). There is no equivalent on Fedora. I'm sure you can configure it with APT and other goodies, but Ubuntu makes it extremely easy - which is why I recommend it for newbies. It is also the first distro I've ever had detect and configure a wireless card out of the box. And all this comes on one CD, not four. Fedora can do the same, but I think they need to re-imagine their distro.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Synn]

I don't think so. The people who go for Ubuntu seem to be in large part the same people who went for Gentoo a year ago (and were making these sorts of comments then as well) - and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006. They're a very vocal group - especially in places like /. - but the actual installed base is pretty inconsequential.

I'd disagree. The flavor of the month type of distro's are usually popular due to some sort of gimmick(compiled for xxx, flashy yyy, source based zzz, etc). Ubuntu basically took a decades old popular distribution and polished it up to the level of Fedora Core's usability.

There are no gimmicks to it, we've seen maybe 30 Debian based distributions prior to Ubuntu so it's hardly a new concept. It's just popular because it offers a high degree of usability.

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Plug]

I ditched FC on my desktop and installed Ubuntu. Couldn't be happier.

Wouldn't run FC on a server anyway - that's what CentOS is for.

Change of Direction

[geomon]

I see that they are willing to support "new Fedora" with engineering and financial assistance, but I wonder how long they will continue to help if the disto takes a turn that they do not support.

What if Fedora begins to look, over time, more like Debian? Would they continue to provide engineering and financial support for that?

An earlier article about Redhat developers wanting to dump old platforms may indicate how tolerant they are in supporting ideals that do not fit into their business model.

Re:Change of Direction

[LnxAddct]

Fedora is the base of their Enterprise Linux line. Whatever Fedora does will become a large chunk of RHEL. Red Hat pays their engineers to work on Fedora, Fedora will still be headed by Red Hat engineers, just from a financial and project standpoint they'll be more independant.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Change of Direction

[Waffle Iron]

I see that they are willing to support "new Fedora" with engineering and financial assistance, but I wonder how long they will continue to help if the disto takes a turn that they do not support.

They've said in the past that Fedora was supposed to be a "test bed" for stuff that will end up in RHEL. It seems like that will become hard to accomplish if they give up control over Fedora's direction. They might have to create a new internal test bed that more directly matches their plans for RHEL, and Fedora might eventually become no more useful for that purpose than most any other distro out there. If that happens, it's hard to see why they would continue to invest resources in it.

Maybe having the public test bed wasn't providing that much benefit, and now they think that grabbing more mindshare from individual developers is a more important goal. Maybe Fedora isn't working out as they planned at all, and this is their way to get rid of it without looking bad. Maybe it's something else altogether. It's hard to say.

Re:Change of Direction

[Jason Earl]

The folks at Red Hat have been doing this for a while. They know that when push comes to shove the folks doing the development control the direction of the project, and since Red Hat is going to be paying for piles of engineering time then they will have most of the control. It's possible that a few highly motivated outsiders might make a splash, but that's what Red Hat is *trying* to accomplish by opening up the process. Don't be surprised if Red Hat makes a habit of hiring (or "sponsoring") prominent non-Red Hat Fedora contributors.

Red Hat's goal with Fedora is to give its customers a chance to help influence (and pay for) development more directly than they could ever hope to with a commercial software company. So there will be plenty of chances to coax Fedora in interesting diretions. However, Red Hat will have plenty of experienced Free Software developers riding herd on Fedora so that it is guaranteed to go in a direction that will be beneficial to everyone involved. There will be disputes of course, and there might even be another fork (like the Mandrake schism that happened when Red Hat decided to develop Gnome instead of using KDE). However, it's not particularly likely that it will come to that. Red Hat has a long history of making fairly good choices, and so there is little chance that forks of Fedora will gain enough developer mind share to really gain traction.

The Fedora developer test bed was working out fine for Red Hat. Fedora simply was facing a lot of competition from organizations like Debian and Ubuntu that many developers saw as being less influenced by corporations. Red Hat is making it more obvious that they want Fedora to become a stand alone distribution, and not just Red Hat lite. Red Hat's execs know that the more development work that goes into Fedora the more Red Hat licenses they sell as Fedora pilot programs turn into serious production environments. Hooking developers with Free Software has been Red Hat's modus operandi from day one, and it's why Red Hat dominates the Linux game despite the fact that SuSE and Caldera generally had better distributions. SuSE and Caldera were too busy trying to lure Linux users with shiny bits of proprietary software, and that never really worked.

Re:Change of Direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat is going to incorporate most of what Fedora develops but Fedora is going to be more independent than they are now? That would mean that RHEL development plans are essentially under the control of Fedora group.

A more likely scenario it seems to me is that while RHEL may incorporate specific developments from Fedora, the key work for RHEL will be done by Red Hat proper rather than Fedora group.

Re:Change of Direction

[True Grit]

Fedora simply was facing a lot of competition from organizations like Debian and Ubuntu that many developers saw as being less influenced by corporations.

Honestly, I can't see anything RH can do to take mind-share away from Debian, Gentoo, or Ubuntu, since on this particular score RH shot themselves in the foot back with their dumping of their free, personal version.

To the other poster: it doesn't matter how easy it was to "upgrade" from RH to Fedora, the issue wasn't a technical one, what hurt RH was the signal they sent to the Linux community that "we're really only interested in business customers; personal Linux users should look elsewhere". No matter how good Fedora becomes, it can't overcome that original damage, since the damage was really about trust, and no amount of technical excellence on their part can fix the trust problem. Which means that if this *is* the reason why they are loosening their hold on Fedora, it won't do them any good, IMO. As you can see from several posts here, people have long memories, and the folks who really *are* concerned with corporate influence are simply not going to use RH, *ever*, not as long as they have Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.

Re:Change of Direction

[Jason Earl]

I am as big a Debian bigot as you are likely to meet. However, I recognize that Red Hat has been about as Free Software friendly as any company could hope to be. The people that are upset with Red Hat are upset because Red Hat denied them the use of Red Hat's good name. Basically these folks made a habit of selling people "Red Hat" solutions without actually involving the fine folks at Red Hat. As you yourself point out, the problem with Red Hat's switch to Fedora wasn't technical, but rather it was due to the fact that you could no longer use the Red Hat name. Red Hat wanted the business customers for themselves, and who can blame them? They created the distribution after all.

Personally I think that Red Hat should be allowed to benefit from their excellent name. I just want Free Software, and Fedora gives that in spades. Fedora is quite popular, and considering all of the work that goes into Fedora it is likely to keep growing in popularity. The real question is what Novell's response to Fedora is likely to be. I happen to prefer Debian's strategy of having a large repository of packages that get tested together over Fedora's strategy of wide availability of third party RPMs, but if Fedora ever wises up and creates a repository system like Debian has, then I would definitely rethink my current strategy.

Thats good

[brickballs]

Fedoras a decent operating system, I'v used it at times before. but what I'm really interested in is the patent reform.

From the article:

"Red Hat also promises to bolster its work on patent reform. After his discussion on open source licensing on Thursday, Webbink told CRN that many vendors including Red Hat and Nokia are pushing for is patent and copyright reforms because current laws presents obstacles to the open source movement. For its part, Red Hat is working with the European Parliament to modify the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive, Red Hat said. In the U.S., Red Hat has called for reform of the patent system to ensure better patent quality."

It looks to me linke Europs really doing better on patent reform than the US. I'm really hoping that we can get our stuff together here stateside before its too late.

Wasn't FC already...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't Fedora a spinoff already? If so, we could have our generations' Happy Days. Linus as the Fonze? More like Richie. ESR can be Mork.

Re:Wasn't FC already...

[Anonymous Coward]

So yer saying Fedora has jumped the shark?

Kde configuration tools, Kde-Ooo

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forgot the inclusion of Kde configuration tools and OOo-Kde and GTK-Qt theme. These too must now be accepted.

umbilical

[hotdiggitydawg]

Sounds like Red Hat is cutting the cord, if you ask me. Still, support in principle is better than no support at all. And they'd never give up on it completely - thousands of developers working for free so they can "add value" and make a bundle?

Re:umbilical

[LnxAddct]

Fedora is officially a testbed of technologies to be integrated into RHEL. Fedora is more or less the base for their enterprise line and that is the plan. Fedora will still be headed by red hat engineers and still funded by red hat, just from a political/financial standpoint they'll be more independant and more open to outside developers. This is already being shown with Fedora Core 4 and the Extras repository.
Regards,
Steve

How are you measuring this success?

[glrotate]

Is this just a hunch, or do you have hard numbers?

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Quick! Someone post distrowatch stats! We all know how definitive those are.

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[georgep77]

Well there is always http://distrowatch.com/> but just in general "mindshare" I get the impression that Ubuntu is gaining favor with many Linux advocates.

_GP_

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[Otter]

Hard numbers. Well, you can decide how meaningful those Nicholas Petreley surveys are -- I have my doubts but the esteemed editors of this site certainly found them trustworthy when it came to Microsoft bashing.

But beyond that, I'll throw in purely anecdotal agreement with the others. I can't recall commercial distributions ever having such a low profile in the overall distro picture.

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[LnxAddct]

You might want to read this.
Regards,
Steve

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft comfirms it. RedHat is, um, living?

Re:How are you measuring this success?

[rekrutacja]

That survey counts only servers (it's Apache based). You can't compare it with desktops, right? I don't say it's innacurate, it simply counts somethinmg else.

But what about Google?

[nokilli]

nt

So we're coming full circle now...

[PenguinBoyDave]

I wonder what lessons, if any, Red Hat has learned from the past two years, and if they would do it all over again?

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[LnxAddct]

What do you mean if they learned anything? Fedora has come to be one of the most successful distros yet. Sure some users left Red Hat (an upper maximum of 10,000) but they gained 400,000 in Fedora and their Enterprise line is doing better then ever. Red Hat is doing everything right, while also being a major backbone in open source development (most of those programs you use have a lot of code from Red Hat paid engineers). There is a reason Michael Dell just invested 99.5 million in the company, he sees it going places. Why should they change? Their growth rates have never been stronger.
Regards,
Steve

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[PenguinBoyDave]

I should clarify...

Red Hat pissed a lot of people off by killing off their "junior" releases (Red Hat 8.0, 9.0, etc.) and I know a lot of businesses that dumped them in favor of other distros.

I like Fedora, but what I am wondering is if they would have gone about killing off the other versions like they did the same way, or would they have gently migrated people over to Fedora.

Just curious...that's all.

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[benjamindees]

killing off the other versions like they did the same way, or would they have gently migrated people over to Fedora.

I've heard this argument over and over, and I still don't understand it. I went straight from RH9 to FC1, as an upgrade, with almost no problems. If you look at the version numbers of the included software, FC1 barely qualifies as a point release of RH9.

Of course, 7.x -> RH8 -> RH9 had it's own problems, which I'm sure was a primary motivator for the creation of Fedora as a RedHat sponsored project. There were many who didn't even want to upgrade from 7.x at the time FC1 came out. What was RedHat supposed to do about that other than "kill it off"?

As far as I can tell, Fedora 1 had the same resources as any of the RedHat versions. If your complaint has to do with the difference in support lifetimes, then I don't know what to tell you. Surely you didn't expect RedHat to continue supporting, for free, a viable competitor to its paid products?

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[PenguinBoyDave]

No...I think Red Hat did the right thing for them. My question really focuses around the backlash they had from a lot of individual users and the Open Source community when they did that. Once Fedora became the rock that it is, things settled down.

This is a "I'm just wondering" type of question. I use both RH EL 4 and Fedora Core (one at work, one at home).

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[Ian Wolf]

There is something about Red Hat that elicits venom and wildly bizarre conspiracy theories about their motives from the "community". Fedora Core 1 was an improvement and the mere existence of the Fedora project has taken a relatively quirky RHEL 2.1 and helped it evolve into a significantly better RHEL 4.

One of the great (comical) things about this community is that 100 nutjobs sound like a 100,000. The sane among us only feel the need to post once or twice in a given story while the cranky gits feel the need to reply to every positive comment with their own subjective, anecdotal, worthless story about why Red Hat is running scared of Ubuntu, trying to subvert Linux, or screwing them in some imaginary way.

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[DesScorp]

Red Hat pissed a lot of people off by killing off their "junior" releases

Yup, me included. I was at one time a happy Red Hat 9.0 user (after having to find a new distro after Caldera was swallowed by SCO), but then they did their infamous "we're killing 8 and 9 off; never mind that they've been out less than a year" thing. I specifically went to Debian then because I knew that they wouldn't obsolete their distro in only 12 months time. Once I get it installed, damnit, I want to use it for a while, without the worry that I'll have to do a major upgrade in just a few months. That's one of the reasons I didn't choose Fedora. They've got a fairly agressive upgrade schedule, and they don't support older realeases.

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat wants the input of open source developers but everything has to fit the profit motive.

Red Hat will continue dating the OSS community but only as long as the code sex is good.

Re:So we're coming full circle now...

[ebvwfbw]

I don't think they have learned anything, they already knew it. That is why they dominate the Linux space. They are probably trying to teach the others the lessons they learned 10 years ago and make the linux space consistent across all the vendors. Teach people not to take things personally. People in the M$ world are very successful because people can take what they learn and move anyplace. Windows is windows is windows (is a pos). Sometimes choice is a bad thing. That is because if you put a choice out there you often get 50% one way and 50% the other. Then they get religious. We need less entrenched religion in the Linux space or it will die. Take all the wasted effort in KDE - Gnome. Pick one and go. That BS put us back years for no good reason.

You are probably thinking they made a mistake with making a paid supported product. A lot of people unfortunately thought RedHat went to an all paid product and totally missed Fedora. Free as in speech, not beer. People wanted free beer and got it for years. Enough is enough. They have bills to pay too. I used to buy their distribution though I usually only bought 1 copy, then when they offered a subscription for $35 I purchased that instead. Today I use both, the paid product and the free distribution. The paid product is very good, extreamely stable. The Suse paid product on the other hand isn't, not even close (though they were getting stable just before Novell bought them). Novell hasn't helped matters any, so far in spite of what their sales weasels (weasel == will say their stuff does anything you throw at them, and it doesn't) say.

I have seen a lot of people dump other distro's and go back to either the RH paid product or Fedora in the past 6 months.

Need of full democracy

[bogaboga]

This is good news. Next, we need "Full Democracy" in selecting foundation officials. We could adopt Debian's approach.

Re:Need of full democracy

[winkydink]

Yeah, look how fast Debian has been able to move and adapt.

IMHO, well-managed projects need a benevolent dictator at the top to keep things moving.

Re:Need of full democracy

[dAzED1]

or at least, a well-oiled republic ;)

Re:Need of full democracy

[eviltypeguy]

One problem with that theory. You criticize Fedora for not being like Debian, even though Fedora's control structure is roughly the same as Ubuntu's. Yet, both Ubuntu and Fedora have none of the problems that Debian has. That isn't to say that Fedora and Ubuntu are equally successful, but they're both more successful than Debian. Tell me again why they should adopt Debian's approach, when it has failed and Fedora and Ubuntu are successful by comparison?

Re:Need of full democracy

[metamatic]

Ubuntu is only successful because it uses Debian. Get rid of Debian and you'd soon see how successful Ubuntu's approach was.

Re:Need of full democracy

[snorklewacker]

> Ubuntu is only successful because it uses Debian. Get rid of Debian and you'd soon see how successful Ubuntu's approach was.

Get rid of Debian and the Debian developers will flock to Ubuntu. The governing bureaucrats will of course take 18 months to switch, at which time Ubuntu will have picked up the developers without the deadwood.

Sounds like a win to me.

Re:Need of full democracy

[xeno-cat]

"Get rid of Debian and the Debian developers will flock to Ubuntu."

Maybe, but that would just make Ubuntu more like Debian. There is nothing stopping Debian developers from "flocking" to Ubuntu right now in fact.

Ubuntu relies heavily on work done in testing and unstable by the Debain developers. Remove Debian and Ubuntu does indeed collapse.

Also note that Shuttleworth pays the ex-Debian developers to work on Ubuntu. It's a very different set of circumstances.

Kind Regards

Re:Need of full democracy

[poofyhairguy82]

There is nothing stopping Debian developers from "flocking" to Ubuntu right now in fact.

Some are.

Remove Debian and Ubuntu does indeed collapse.

Can't happen. Debian is OSS. Even if development stopped (and it won't) the work done wouldn't magically go away.

Ubuntu relies heavily on work done in testing and unstable by the Debain developers.

False, Ubuntu only uses Sid.

Re:Need of full democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian is a giant, no a mammoth, among not just linux distributions but among operating systems.

The tens of thousands of packages that form the OS with internal dependencies, configuration, awareness and multi-arch reach is something that has NEVER, EVER been achieved by any other vendor EVER. Debian stability and portability is legendary. So there's a gap between the last and upcoming -STABLE. If you really depend on Debian *and* need to keep up with the latest sources, you can always follow backports.org or pick a derivative like ubuntu.

Oh, and did I mention that the entire operation is run by volunteers? A structure that according to classic economic theory shouldn't even be able to function at this scale?

Re:Need of full democracy

[xeno-cat]

"Can't happen. Debian is OSS. Even if development stopped (and it won't) the work done wouldn't magically go away."

It's not the work done that matters, it's the work /being done/. If Debian stops maintaining unstable, it will languish and die, taking Ubuntu with it.

Why don't you take a look at the work that goes into unstable. I don't think you have a real grasp of things here.

Ubuntu is great, Ubuntu is wounderful. I am using Ubuntu right now. They are not super heros. They are a part of the Debian universe of goodness.

Kind Regards

Red Hat Spins Off Fedora Project

[fox9397]

I wonder if they are trying to help shake off the feeling some have that fedora is just a Red Hat Beta distribution.

Just join Debian already

[S. Baldrick]

Why do we need two separate Linux packaging "communities?" Debian already spans multiple architectures and multiple kernels. Multiple package formats would not be too much of a stretch particularly using apt as a unifying layer over both. Each distro has some unique stuff the other could use but mostly they are duplicating work. And they share the same Free Software ideals. So IMO a merger would make sense.

Re:Just join Debian already

[MynockGuano]

Could be because Fedora has practically gone from non-existence all the way through 3 releases and nearly a 4th since Debian last saw a release. Different focus, different communities.

Re:Just join Debian already

[Trigun]

Not to start a flame war, but if I liked debian, I'd use debian.

I use slackware, because I like slackware. I can use Debian if I have to, but it's my choice to use slack. Anything that apt can do I can do with ldd and a tgz package. That's my choice. I don't want a debian system, any more than I want an Ubuntu system, anymore than I want a mandrake system. And once I can coerce Pat Voldekerg to include PAM, I won't have to roll my own slack packages.

Re:Just join Debian already

[S. Baldrick]

Read the article. Red Hat wants to increase community involvement (Read: stop subsidizing it so much.) Debian has the most advanced volunteer community of any distro. Why duplicate their work?

As for release management, there is no reason why you couldn't cherry pick packages from the Debian mainstream and release them faster. Isn't that exactly what Ubuntu is doing?

Re:Just join Debian already

[Narchie Troll]

Dropline includes PAM if you're interested in having GNOME. That's one of the main reasons that it didn't get an official recommendation when Slackware dropped GNOME.

Re:Just join Debian already

[Trigun]

Yes, and I've even compiled KDE to use PAM and just installed the dropline pam-relevant stuff. The main problem is the lack of coordination between the two camps. --current has been known to break things, as right now there is a new GCC with NPTL threads in current, and dropline is not compiled against it, and won't be until we get slack 10.2 or 11.0, whatever the next version is.

I am hoping that Pat realizes that slackware is going to be left behind, stuck in single-server installations, pushed to the network fringe, unless he breaks down and accept PAM, and with Novell's network logon and Fedora's newly gpl-ed directory server both out there now, I hope he breaks down and goes with PAM.

I wonder...

[Lord Kano]

If this has anything to do with the negative image that RedHat has had in the community since the termination of their "free" distro.

LK

Re:I wonder...

[LnxAddct]

That negative image that you're thinking of is non-existant. Its just a small group of people making a bunch of noise.
Regards,
Steve

question about ago old redhat peeve....

[tloh]

It has been a while since I've followed the redhat camp. I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades. As recently as a few months ago, my brother in law switched to Gentoo in frustration after he ran into too much hastle trying to get a SQL package installed on his redhat laptop. The last thing I heard with a bearing on this topic was work being done by Ian Murdock attempting to bring Redhat and Debian closer together. Does anyone know how much that effort has progressed?

Re:question about ago old redhat peeve....

[Erwos]

"I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades"

It's called "yum". It works pretty well now - the speed issues have been solved, and it's on more or less equal footing with apt, at least in my experience. Dependency issues are more or less dead, and have been since FC1.

-Erwos

Re:question about ago old redhat peeve....

[SirTalon42]

Its great to hear that Yum is making good progress, I use Apt on my laptop (FC3), and like it a lot because in the past it has been loads faster than yum, though when I installed Fedora on my friends computers I have had trouble getting apt installed, and had to settle w/ using yum on it, and found it to be painfully slow, so its good to hear that progress has been made. Hopefully there will be a front end like synaptic soon for it.

Re:question about ago old redhat peeve....

[Erwos]

Most of the time, slowness with Yum is actually slowness of the mirror being used. Most people who install apt are only using _one_ server, and said server tends to be on the above average side.

Re:question about ago old redhat peeve....

[Flying Purple Wombat]

I run synaptic on FC3, it works just fine. Follow the instructions at http://fedoranews.org/contributors/stanton_finley/ fc3_note/

Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[rice_burners_suck]

As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support.

Reminds me of the time that Wind River Systems "spun off" the support they initially gave to the FreeBSD project after buying out Walnut Creek CD-ROM. The community had sent them a number of questions, and their answer was something along the lines of, "We will continue to encourage emerging stewards of the FreeBSD project," along with paragraph after paragraph of additional meaningless duckspeak, in the same form as, "By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions."

What I'm essentially trying to say, then, is that Red Hat will, for a short time, continue to give equal amounts of support to the Fedora project. But this will slowly wane, as I believe has been Red Hat's plan all along. That is why the name was changed from Red Hat Linux to Fedora Core. They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software, in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there. The kernel will continue to adhere to the GPL, as will other major components (think Samba, Apache, etc.) with their respective licenses. But I think that nearly all Red Hat development will be in the closed source arena.

This way, Red Hat will have achieved the following interesting goal: They are widely known as the de facto Linux standard, because they were open source for years and provided a lot to the community. But on the other hand, they will be able to make a lot of money on their Enterprise stuff, because most of it will be proprietary and the technologies therein will be unavailable in Fedora or in any other Linux for that matter. Think Mac OS X. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be about as open source as Apple's software... Sure, hundreds of thousands of lines of code are open source. But the really good stuff, the really innovative stuff, the new stuff that no other OS has is proprietary, closed source, binary, and locked out of view.

This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[Skiron]

I disagree. Redhat make their money from support and the support of the code - all the code is released under GPL, and you can download it.

I think they are gearing up to become a fully supportive company for businesses - where you can't afford to produce mainline code that isn't up to scratch - and let the Fedora code (their off-spring) take it's first tentative steps away from the nest.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[Erwos]

"This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat."

Your conspiracy theory is contradicted by, well, everything.

Red Hat bought Netscape Directory Server. They promptly released it as Free software.

They had the cluster file system. They released it as Free software.

RHEL3 and RHEL4 are _all_ Free software. Not some - all.

Sorry, but there is still a very strong Free software sentiment going on over there, and you only need to read the blogs of the employees to find it out. They don't sell anything proprietary, unless you count RHN (which isn't distributed per se anyways).

If you want to convince people, try presenting, I don't know, a coherent argument with some sort of evidence. "I think" is pretty crappy proof.

-Erwos

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[Anonymous Coward]

bravo bravo. you've found them out! you really don't have a clue do you...

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[justi9]

You are wildly wrong. Szulik just said it, and as a former insider, I can vouch for it, too: Virtually all of Red Hat's employees work on Fedora, and that's not going to change. They do not want to ditch Fedora. They want to use it better.

Make no mistake. They want to use Fedora to

* Remain attractive to enthusiasts and other non-enterprise users
* Enlist outside resources to help improve something that ultimately becomes RHEL
* Sell more RHEL

The advantage of their approach is the potential for the mutual benefit of the enthusiast and the enterprise participants. With a virtuous cycle like that, it may actually "sell more RHEL".

(If you make sure to wear your tin-foil hat, it'll be easier for us to steer clear of you.)

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[Hard_Code]

"The kernel will continue to adhere to the GPL, as will other major components (think Samba, Apache, etc.) with their respective licenses. But I think that nearly all Red Hat development will be in the closed source arena."

So What.

If they are still abiding by the law, let them sell whatever they want. Hipsters may not like Red Hat simply because it has the most mindshare (and market share?) but who cares. If you don't like Red Hat proprietary software, just don't buy it, the same as you do for any other type of proprietary software you don't like. Red Hat is already being undercut by all the "White Box Linux"s and "Pink Derby"s and "Tofu Sandwich Linux"s. If you judge only by actions, I think you have to believe Red Hat has done a hell of a lot of good for the community and hasn't asked much (anything?) for it.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[wolf31o2]

unless you count RHN (which isn't distributed per se anyways)

I just wanted to point out that Red Hat's Satellite Server product is a local copy of RHN, and definitely is distributed. The company that I work for uses it.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[jmorris42]

> They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called
> Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software,
> in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there.

Common conspiracy theory, but almost certainly wrong. Where do you think they GET their Enterprise distro? Fedora. RHEL4 is basically FC3 cleaned up and polished a bit more. They know they lack the resources to fully test enterprise software inhouse so they depend on Fedora for wide testing of all new technology. See SELinux, udev, heck even the 2.6 kernel.

Currently RH does ship some closed components, such as a JDK, Acrobat, Flash, etc. But they do it on a totally seperate CD-ROM called Extras. As far as I know they don't own the rights to a single line of code that isn't currently Free or in the process of becoming free (some parts of their new directory server aren't yet Free Software but is scheduled to become so) so it would be crossing a bright red line if they ever produced a closed package.

If you don't believe me, go to ftp.redhat.com and download the entire source for RHEL and look at the license tags on the packages. 100% OSS/FS product and likely to remain that way. RH 'gets it' on the value of Open so they aren't likely to do something as suicidal as what you are afraid of.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[PMoonlite]

Sounds like a troll, but I'll take the bait.

What you're describing is impossible for Red Hat for one reason: Red Hat is, relatively speaking, a tiny shop. They barely have enough people to keep on top of integrating the incoming updates produced by the open source community. They don't have the resources to maintain significant features apart from open source software. Every way in which a distribution deviates from open source means that the distributor has to spend resources maintaining that difference. This is why Fedora is in fact absolutely essential to Red Hat's strategy. Red Hat can influence the direction of development, but still reap the benefits of all the people working on the software for free.

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must mean like Mozilla did with the suite and Firefox.

Mandrake uses KDE by default or has no default

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending on which version you download, either KDE is the default or you have to choose. You got it wrong...

Re:Mandrake uses KDE by default or has no default

[brontus3927]

Did I? Shit. Guess that's what happens when you manage to go a 6 months without reinstalling an OS...you go soft and forget things.

Re:Mandrake uses KDE by default or has no default

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Here's the distrowatch page:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mand rake

Notice it's KDE default throughout the existence of Mandrake.

Re:Mandrake uses KDE by default or has no default

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake makes it really easy to choose your window manager when you install, and then makes it easy to change it afterwords. I can see how someone could choose the Gnome option, and then forget about it. One of my Mandrake systems runs Gnome, the other KDE. I kind of like the variety.

Let me 'splain it...

[jav1231]

"In their continuing efforts to remove themselves from the "little people," Red Hat announced today they will distance themselves from the Fedora Project and spin it off. You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base by EOL'ing Red Hat Linux 9 and decided not to release another desktop version for the masses. Rather, they directed these users to their Fedora Project; assuring customers at the time that they stood solidly behind the project (this despite leaving many customers with PAID support high-and-dry). With this latest news, Red Hat can further distance itself from these pesky end users and concentrate on what it sees as its true revenue stream, corporations."

Re:Let me 'splain it...

[Eric Smith]

You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base by EOL'ing Red Hat Linux 9 and decided not to release another desktop version for the masses.

When they first announced Fedora, that was sort of my take on it. I was unhappy about it, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. In my opinion time has shown that they have done exactly what they said, and not screwed anyone. The Fedore Core distributions have had the same degree of quality I had come to expect of the RHL distributions, on a more stable release schedule, with no official support. If you want paid support, or less frequent releases, you can use RHEL.

Most of the people that criticize Fedora seem to be criticizing it over the very things that were done deliberately as project objectives.

The only area in which they've failed to meet the stated objectives is in facilitating community participation, and this new foundation seems like a step in the right direction to improve that.

Re:Let me 'splain it...

[Anonymous Coward]

You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base


Interesting read of the situation.

RH: We are really interested in the server space, so we are going to focus our efforts there.

Users: RH, you OWE us! I know I've never paid you one red cent, and that I choose what I do for free based on what I want, not on what others expect, but ... how can you fsck us by not doing what we want you to do?

Re:Let me 'splain it...

[jav1231]

Idiot: "You were all bilking RH and downloading their free distro and now you're upset."
Users: "Ummm...we paid for RDL, moron. Furthermore, there were those who paid for it mere weeks before it was dropped and therefore LOST paid support!"

Re:Let me 'splain it...

[stlhawkeye]

I never thought of it like that. How dare they make business decisions to ensure their fiscal viability for investors when they could be doing shit for free and giving it to me!

They're just greedy that's all. Right, jav1231? Not like us, who are demanding free shit! We're not greedy!

Re:Let me 'splain it...

[jav1231]

Uh...no. How about all of the purchases of RH? How about those who PAID for BOXED COPIES of RH WITH support who were summarily DROPPED!? Even RH admitted they didn't drop RHDL because they were losing money. YES, they are free to make a business decision. However, many customers lost support as a result of it and frankly RH made a business decision they didn't want that market. It wasn't because they didn't actually have revenue from it, they just wanted to focus elsewhere.

Fedora Legacy

[j-turkey]

I wonder what will happen to Fedora legacy support with RH out of the picture?

Re:Fedora Legacy

[Eric Smith]

I wonder what will happen to Fedora legacy support with RH out of the picture?

Why would it be any different? Fedora legacy support has never been done by Red Hat.

And it's inaccurate to claim that RH will be out of the picture.

Re:Fedora Legacy

[j-turkey]

Why would it be any different? Fedora legacy support has never been done by Red Hat.

I'm under the impression that RH had developers working on legacy. This is incorrect?

And it's inaccurate to claim that RH will be out of the picture.

You're right, that is an overstatement, my bad.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat can't make any money off of Fedora, so they're "freeing up its future". It's an admission that the services model only works when the services are a mandatory part of the package (if it works at all).

Re:Translation

[RPoet]

What are you saying? Fedora was never meant to be a money maker for Red Hat. On the contrary, Fedora was meant to be a place for Red Hat to pour valuable resources into; research, more or less, in the hope that it might in some indirect way benefit their Enterprise Linuxes. Red Hat has been clear about this intention from day one, so there is no "services model" that has failed or anything else.

Re:Translation

[Teh_monkeyCode]

Services are not available for Fedora from Red Hat. All service contracts refer to RHEL.

once again how is this news?

[t35t0r]

We knew this when redhat first said they were going to stop giving away free support back in april of 2003 and that RH9 would the the last "free" supported version. Furthermore we were told to look to the new Fedora distribution (core 1) which would be a separate entity from RH.

Re:once again how is this news?

[Eric Smith]

We knew this when redhat first said they were going to stop giving away free support back in april of 2003

What on earth are you talking about? The free support for RHL was mailing lists and Bugzilla, with no service level agreement for either. The free support for Fedora is exactly the same.

The only thing that went away was PAID support. When you PURCHASED an official RHL box, you got 30 days of PAID installation support with it, and you could BUY additional support.

Howto Download - Explained here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on "Free" at the bottom, wait for the timer to count down at the bottom, it will give you a download ticket and a link.

Confused...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there some advantage in making Fedora independent?

If Red Hat continues to provide the bulk of the engineering and financial support, then making Fedora "independent" means what exactly?

Re:Confused...

[ClosedSource]

It means that Red Hat will phase out its engineering and financial support for Fedora once it has slipped off the radar screen.

Re:Confused...

[Anonymous Coward]

> It means that Red Hat will phase out its engineering and financial support for Fedora once it has slipped off the radar screen. Right. That's been their plan all along. Sever their arm to spite their face. It's the same reason that you can download almost any piece of software under their umbrella, inspect it and use it. It's also why they pay their developers to contribute so heavily to kernel development and other open source projects. It's why they buy Netscape Directory and then give it away. Take a look at the latest RHEL package set, compare it to FC3, and tell me if you really think that is what they are going to do.

Re:Confused...

[ClosedSource]

I guess you believe that Red Hat is all sweetness and light. Perhaps having 90% of your product development done by unpaid volunteers does that to you.

I predict we'll be hearing a lot less about Fedora in the years to come. We'll see if I'm right or wrong.

Maybe, Maybe Not

[jpowers]

It's certainly possible that they choose to do this, but everything they've done recently has made what you're describing more difficult. The next version of Red Hat ES is Fedora, and not just the kernel, but pretty much throughout. Their major new "innovations" which I guess would be GFS or this rebuilt Directory Server are open source (GFS is built on the LVM code).

Redhat's developers see Fedora and Redhat as the same OS. They've been open and direct with the community, even when parts of their company have not. From talking to both their devs and some of their community relations (ie marketing) people face to face, I got the impression that they had been focused so much on getting the ES distros and future projects in order that they'd left community development in the wrong hands internally.

We run Fedora 3 servers here (we're a US Gov-funded nonprofit, so I will never pay a license fee for support I'll never use. No $400 screwdrivers up this way.) and with one exception, I get all the functionality I require:

So far the major issue we have run into is that what little proprietary software my users need requires Redhat 7.2 or a set of compat-libs that are not available as part of Fedora. This does make some sense for Redhat: If you want an Oracle, SAS or Splus support plan, they expect you to have a support plan for your OS, too, at which point you may as well be paying for Redhat.

If your company, unlike mine, has the sense to avoid expensive proprietary software like this, there's no reason not to use Fedora. FC3 is much faster on Intel hardware than FC2 was, and the FC4 prerelease I've been running on amd64 has been realy impressive - though the package changes they've made in the extras repo seems to lean towards more Sun java support, much like the recent OpenOffice 2 Beta. This suits my dev group just fine, but I think the python devs might be gettign short shrift.

Re:Maybe, Maybe Not

[bob]

In that last paragraph, s/sense to avoid/good fortune to not need/. It isn't always that simple.

Re:Maybe, Maybe Not

[jpowers]

In that last paragraph, s/sense to avoid/good fortune to not need/. It isn't always that simple.

You're right, it isn't always simple. Some people here say "The NCI put a gun to our head and forced us to use Oracle Clinical," and some say "we could have used whatever we wanted, and the million dollars they gave us ended up costing us more than we gained."

As tough as it is to see an alternative sometimes, there's always a a choice.

Re:Maybe, Maybe Not

[bob]

Tell me what alternative there is to SAS, for the things that SAS does really well, like grinding through enormous flat files and generating sophisticated statistical reports. I've found plenty of things that do bits and pices of what people use SAS for, but there's a core functionality for which there simply is nothing else available, and if it were possible to code something up in a few weeks to replace it, I promise you someone would already have done it, and they haven't.

Sure, you can use Scilab or Octave instead of Matlab, but only if you don't need any of the really cool toolboxes. Try telling an analyst making $150K/year that his or her time isn't worth a Matlab license. Show me an open-source CAD package that can handle a buildable 3D model of an office building or airplane, down to the threads on the screws.

Now, Matlab is a bad example because to Mathworks' credit they don't require an "enterprise" distribution. But to say "there's always a choice" is disingenuous. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis the right way and doing it a half-assed way because your organization won't pony up the bucks for the right software. Sometimes the choice is between getting your work done on schedule and not. Sometimes the choice is between a $25,000 package and $50,000 of labor. Sometimes the choice is between doing an analysis and not doing it at all.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't touch a commercial package anytime there is an actual substitute. For everything we do, PostgreSQL is just fine, we woudn't touch Oracle with a ten-foot pole. We've killed off every Windows server except the few AD, SMS & SUS controllers we need to meet internal "enterprise-wide" requirements. We use OpenBSD for DNS & Kerberos servers in part because it isn't supported on Red Hat WS, you need ES or AS, and that just seemed silly [although we buy $500 worth of CDs for every OpenBSD distribution to support them, so it isn't *just* because we're cheap].

But if you think that there aren't any commercial packages for which there is no real substitute, either you have way to much time on your hands, or you have the luxury of saying no when you get asked to do something for which there *is* no open-source software, or, like I said, you have the good fortune to just not need it for anything you do, because what you think is wrong.

Oracle

[delcielo]

Oracle's preferred distro is RedHat. Their developers work closely together on integration and compatibility.

So, most of these burgeoning Linux Oracle installs are on RedHat.

Re:Oracle

[IANAAC]

I don't know how closely you follow OTN, but they've been gradually putting out more "Oracle on SUSE" articles. And they fully support Oracle/SUSE installs. It only makes sense to do so.

On a personal note, I use SUSE as my desktop, and have now transitioned into an Oracle DBA role at work (jury's still out on that :-)). But I continue to use Oracle on both RH and SUSE on the server side. I for one, amd glad they support more than one distro.

Re:Oracle

[M1FCJ]

oh come on, Oracle is fully supported on SuSE SLES as well and their techies will suggest FTP versions as well (although not for production and 'not-supported').

I wish RedHat would just die

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat I never use it, always been a Slackware user. There's lots of other great distros Debian, etc. you dont' need RedHat. I have a nickname for RH I call it Red Crap.

who cares.

Re:I wish RedHat would just die

[PsychoSid]

I have a nickname for RH I call it Red Crap.

With sparkling wit like that I cannot believe you are posting anonymously.

Shout your name from the rooftops. Fame awaits !

Re:I wish RedHat would just die

[Anonymous Coward]

You said it yourself: "RedHat I never use it".

Say no more!

You should try fedora. It is the best distro out there if you want the beeding edge packages safely (yes, bleeding edge can be stable because fedora release is a snapshot) and easily (yum or whatever you use makes installations extremely easy - and yes, now it works like debian: apt-get dist-upgrade can be used to upgrade the whole distro release). Also about easy: fedora's packages work usually out-of-the-box! It is nice that I only have to modify configuration when I want to do something different. Usually I can just install and run. :)

Re:I wish RedHat would just die

[tehdaemon]

I believe you mispelled 'flame' :)

open sourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

With all this open source talk goin on, i can just imagine a situation like this:

CEO: "We should make ALL our products open source!"

Why use XXXX?

[bogie]

What advantages does it have over distro X? Different strokes for different folks my friend. Why ask why and invite the flames?

btw what's with all the Ubuntu posts claiming that it somehow has something to do with this decision. How arrogant can you get?

Re:Why use XXXX?

[FidelCatsro]

Possibly because Ubuntu is its closest competitor in the eyes of many here , its the old .deb vs .rpm thing

Re:Why use XXXX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or worse, apt vs rpm, for those who had not taken a look at Red Hat or Fedora since RH7.0.

These numbers, where do they come from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your ass?

What is Fedora's niche now?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the success of the Ubuntu and Kubuntu community distributions, it's hard to see where Fedora's place in the Linux universe exists now. There are few reasons why a user would choose Fedora for the desktop these days: if you want commercial enterprise support RHWS or NDL, for commercial home users Mandrake and others fit the bill. For free servers it hardly makes sense to choose Fedora over CentOS or the soon-to-be-stable Debian Sarge.

I just don't understand what the target market for Fedora is supposed to be now. As a former user, it's not that I hate the distro, and I admit the Red Hat team that works on it is very very good. But still, I can't think of a single class of users who I'd recommend Fedora to, while there are lots of users who I could recommend Suse, RHEL, CentOS, Mandrake, Ubuntu, NDL, etc. Even Gentoo and the other do-it-yourself distros have a perfectly legitimate place in the Linux world. I just can't see Fedora's independent of Red Hat or not.

Oh irony

[ragnar]

"The proposed patents common, which mimics the Creative Commons licensing scheme for creative works including art and music, is designed to enable developers to exchange ideas with fewer concerns about patent infringement. and Red Hat's efforts to lobby for patent reform in the U.S. and Europe."

For all this good talk about respecting people's creative energy and IP reform, they are at present trampling on the real Fedora project's rights.

Re:Oh irony

[argent]

they are at present trampling on the real Fedora project's rights.

Interesting. Have you got any more details of what the restrictions they're concerned about are?

Re:

Red Hat's use of the Fedora(TM) brand name and its assertion of ownership over that name are of considerable concern to the Cornell and Virginia Fedora(TM) project team. Red Hat's guidelines for use of the Fedora(TM) brand place restrictions on use of a term for which the Cornell and Virginia team have over five years of prior use. This position seems inconsistent with Red Hat's stance on open source and its prominence in the open source community. There are also costs due to confusion about the name. These include misunderstandings in the open source community about the identity of the products and resulting work for the Cornell and Virginia Fedora(TM) support staff due to questions unrelated to their specific project.

Re:Oh irony

[ragnar]

I may have been a little dramatic with my language. Basically Red Hat pumped a lot of money into the Fedora name but neglected to check if it was in use. They want UVa and Cornell to change the name of their product, even though it was in circulation for five years before Red Hat came along.

I dig Linux and generally think Red Hat is a cool company, but they aren't winning friends by sending their legal teams after researchers at Universities.

Re:Oh irony

[argent]

Red Hat says they asked Cornell, and Cornell was OK with Red Hat using it. At first, anyway.

Wasn't there an article

[ahdeoz]

Wasn't there an article a couple months ago about how Redhat had seen the error of their ways by splitting of Fedora and had decided to bring it back within the fold, though the specifics of whether they were going to rebrand Fedora as Redhat personal or whether they were going to keep the RHEL codebase inline with the Fedora Core were undetermined.

Re:Wasn't there an article

[benjamindees]

Heh. Maybe you're thinking of Fedora Extras, which never really was "split off" but was always separate. It was recently moved from the old fedora.us project to a RedHat-controlled server.

But, even if you're not, I wouldn't be suprised. RedHat is the most schizophrenic company ever to have existed. Look at their various experimental offerings in Linux support over the past ten years. Just as one of them starts gaining traction, it's killed off and replaced with a completely different business model.

It's like they don't employ actual "business" people there, just a bunch of engineers going "I know what would be cool! Subscriptions for .iso downloads and updates at faster speeds!" So they roll it out, piss off customers who are used to downloading the isos for free (who immediately start work on creating bittorrent), sell a bunch of subscriptions to noobs, *bam* bittorrent is released, the RH engineers go "oh shit" and cancel the whole thing. Meanwhile the noobs are going "WTF? Where's my faster .isos?" because they won't have realized what bittorrent is for another six months, by which time they'll have moved on to paying for SuSE or just said "Screw this, Linux sucks."

RedHat management says "We don't want another bittorrent debacle" and realize "Look, people are independently supporting our releases" so they decide to cooperate with "the community" instead of making them customers and decide to take control of the Fedora project. Of course, Fedora has had it's own growing pains, because "the community" doesn't really want to use RedHat, they just want a version of Debian with more frequent releases. Oops, did I say "Ubuntu"?

And, I haven't even begun to get started on RedHat's various ideas and prices of the "Linux desktop". That's a whole other rant...

What about a Kedora?

[Jagasian]

Ubuntu has two flavors, Gnome and KDE, in the form of Ubuntu and Kubuntu. So when will Fedora get a Kedora, i.e. a flavor that does not have KDE as a second-class desktop?

Re:What about a Kedora?

[bogado]

As if fedora wasn't a bad enough name. :-D

"Fedor" in portuguese means bad smell. Fedora seems to us here in Brazil like a invented feminine form of stink. "o fedor / a fedora"

Re:What about a Kedora?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that "fedora" is an English word for a type of hat, right?

Re:What about a Kedora?

[bogado]

Actually, I didn't know, a quick check in the wikipedia enlightmed the details. I aways had assumed that fedora was some greek reference. :-P Nice to know, thanks... :-D

Linux now = Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened here? Remember a little over ten years ago there was a new exciting operating system out there? It was called Linux. Where is that now? It was an idea, something cool, something...

Redhat tried to make money and in the end all they are doing is what Sun still offers except they got the labor for free. Now they have a successful business model and their own programmers and their own corporate jets.... They are trying to profit on a base of sharing, goodwill and knowledge.

The GNU License today? A legal document that tries to be fair but is being picked apart by greed.

Now everyone wants a piece, Hell even Slashdot and Sourceforge are bought so is the name Linux.com (by the same company by the way) Note the Dot COM = commercial.

Linus himself is raking in millions

Want a "commercial" solution? Get rid of ALL these distributions. It is insane and idiotic. You want to make a commercial product? Make a new one. How about commercial Linux? Be up front. Say this is what we are going to do and this is how we are going to pay for things, this percentage goes back to the projects (Apache MySql etc. ) in these amount AND it is going to be bullet proof for your business, we will back you. Red Hat's mistake? They come off, as being number one back ten years ago, then we support them then as the years go by they pull away the support or charge for it. They come up with "new products" confusion about what is free what's the difference with this one, lets make Gnome and KDE look the same the list goes on but in the end the community that made them is not welcome unless you can pay. Sure burns me. I can't be the only one.

Whatever happened to United Linux? It is a rhetorical question but you can't unite many distributions. That too is stupid.

Now for a distro solution? There is none. Why should there be? Let people make stuff and let it rock.

Why is Ubuntu doing so well? Maybe it is newest version that hasn't been bent by greed and money yet. They come off as sharing and for the world. I tried to find the site at http://ubuntu.org/ but my mistake it is actually at http://ubuntu.com/

Re:Linux now = Greed

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break it to you, but companies like Red Hat contribute a hell of a lot of time and effort to Linux. Mountains of code in the Linux kernel are the result of Red Hat's efforts.

And to set the record straight - Fedora is what Red Hat used to be. Red Hat simply changed its marketing focus and made a ton of money off of it but they never forgot the little people who brought them there.

Ubuntu, while good, is just another one of the many obscure Linux distributons out there.

Lightening Load for Buyout, Maybe?

[blueZhift]

Call me crazy, but I can't help but wonder if spinning off Fedora will make it easier for a future Red Hat buyout by Microsoft because of issues concerning the GPL, a license that Microsoft considers viral. Not too long ago Microsoft and Red Hat sat down for a little chat and shortly before that, Michael Dell put a whole bunch of his own money in Red Hat. Are these all connected? Maybe, maybe not, but it does make you go hmmmmm.

Re:Lightening Load for Buyout, Maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tin. Foil. Hat.

Re:Lightening Load for Buyout, Maybe?

[ClosedSource]

I can't imagine why Microsoft would want to buy Red Hat. It probably cost more time and effort to create MS Bob than it would to create MS Linux.

Slashdot Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fucking annoying that stupid moderators accepting every ronald fucking pirquel articles, and rejecting my article even though it's accepted using same topic after 2 hours...

I'm telling you /. you damn suck, and you to reader move along nothing to see here.

Have a clue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have a clue. It's well know that the Slashdot "editors" like the kind of "lip service" that Roland gives them.

Big Clients != Profitable Company

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a bad business model the difference between having big clients and little clients is that with big clients you lose your money faster.

RedHate Abandonment

[smartfart]

How did they abandon anyone? By no longer putting a RH desktop distro on store shelves? It wasn't profitable.

We can argue about the profitablility aspect. I don't think it costs a lot to press a CD and print a box, though. If you're saying that they thought they could make more money focusing on the "enterprise" market, you're right.

About the abandonment aspect, most Linux geeks were very much put out by Red Hat's decision to discontinue the non-enterprise product and to de-support it. They left everyone in a lurch by doing so, and not just the geeks. As elsewhere noted, when the suits think Linux they think Red Hat, and quite a number of smaller companies that would never consider buying or being forced to upgrade to an enterprise product were stuck with having to either run an unpatched server or pay for an expensive migration to another distro.

After six months or so, if memory serves me, the fedoralegacy.org project was started to provide patches for old Red Hat installations. Too little, too late, in my opinion. Perhaps this new foundation will in fact repair the damage done regarding geek opinion of Redhat/Fedora/whatever_is_next.

...Oh, and hi, Greg! Still gonna buy me lunch? Heh, heh.

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you forgot to mention that RedHat gave a *free* upgrade to RHEL for all Red Hat Linux users and that Red Hat Linux could smoothly be upgraded to Fedora.

How on earth can you call that abandonment?

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[LDoggg_]

About the abandonment aspect, most Linux geeks were very much put out by Red Hat's decision to discontinue the non-enterprise product and to de-support it. They left everyone in a lurch by doing so, and not just the geeks. As elsewhere noted, when the suits think Linux they think Red Hat, and quite a number of smaller companies that would never consider buying or being forced to upgrade to an enterprise product were stuck with having to either run an unpatched server or pay for an expensive migration to another distro.

I still get regular updates from redhat on fedora. Little icon on the corner of my screen lights up when there are new patches to download. If you want an officially supported desktop you can buy:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/client/

After six months or so, if memory serves me, the fedoralegacy.org project was started to provide patches for old Red Hat installations.

Fedora core 1 had the ability to download updates from the start. Fedoralegacy is to support users that don't want to keep up with the fedora release cycle.

Too little, too late, in my opinion. Perhaps this new foundation will in fact repair the damage done regarding geek opinion of Redhat/Fedora/whatever_is_next.

Any "damage" that was done was by uninformed people spreading fud in public forums like slashdot.
Redhat shifted focus on its commercial products to its paying customers while still donating a huge amount of development time to the free project. They wanted their business to survive... ooooh the horror!

...Oh, and hi, Greg! Still gonna buy me lunch? Heh, heh.

Sorry, not sure who Greg is.

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[Anonymous Coward]

I have run Linux systems in a minor way in a major corporate for the last ten years or so.

I have a problem with Red Hat's change of policy.

Its not the usual whine about abandonment however...

If I attempt to install a supported system from Red Hat, I need to undertake a contract that all my companies servers running RH software will be included on support. I can't speak for the rest of the company. Worse, they can't speak for me.

So no guerilla installs of Red Hat any more, and no prospect of any existing installations reaching the critical point and actually justifying a RH support contract.

I understand Red Hat's issue, if you are running standard hardware, and all you need is software support, why pay for support on more than a single instance of the hardware?

Unfortunately as far as I am concerned, the outcome of their cure for that problem is to make Red Hat unusable in any environment where there Linux deployment is not an all or nothing decision.

There are of course plenty of Linux distributions without such limiting terms, including Fedora.

So my complaint with Red Hat is that they have shot themselves in the foot, since many many Linux systems are initially set up as a toe in the water "skunkworks" system.

Red Hat have shut themselves out of that avenue of deployment opportunity and in the process inconvenienced me. And lots like me. Not clever.

Shoka

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[asciiRider]

Earth to smartfart
come in, smartfart.
Earth to smartfart,
come in, smartfart.

You think redhat gives two farts about "companies that would never consider buying an enterprise product" ? What obligation should Redhat have? Every product eventually gets eol'd, why should a free product be any different?

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[sw155kn1f3]

I've been updating my rh8 servers from fedoralegacy for about 2 years... rh9 for 1 year... So what are you talking about, again?

Re:RedHate Abandonment

[smartfart]

That's interesting. This page on fedoralegacy.org says: Please note that support for RHL 7.2 and RHL 8.0 has been suspended, and that new updates are no longer being generated for these versions!

Fedora vs Ubuntu

[9mind]

I currently run both at home and at work. The biggest reason I think Fedora is being released into the wild by RedHat is.... Fedora users want a server where they can get that xmms with MP3 functionality, or get those w32codecs to use in MPlayer.

The reason RedHat sees so much commercial support is that they uphold people's patents by not including functionality to certain apps that would violate it.

However, their Fedora users could care less about that, and will quickly jump ship to Ubuntu to be able to add that repo and get all that functionality, patents be damned!

So in order to not lose their commercial support, but keep their FC users happy (aka RHEL Beta Testers) they need to release FC to the wind, so that they can go Ubuntu wild (patents be damned!).

I think it makes since.... as I use APT-RPM on my FC boxes using ATrpms.net as my base, this will allow the FC team to put that illicit MP3 support in, and not be connected OFFICIALLY to the upstanding RedHat corporation. ;)

Re:Fedora vs Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason fedora couldn't use mp3 is because it's linked to a commercial entity (redhat). The other non-profit distros aren't saying "patents be damned" like some kind of rebel...it's because the mp3 patent holder said non-profits don't have to pay, only commercial users.

Fedora Directory Server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that we have two open source LDAP servers:

Which one should I choose? Which one is better? And which one is more widely supported? And finally, which one will get better in the future?

mp3 support finally...?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, Now that Fedora is no longer part of a for-profit org I guess this means they can put mp3 support back in? This is the biggest bitch of the distro. If you just use xmms no biggy...but if you actually use sound editing software its basically "do it yourself" since nothing is compiled properly. I actually switched to just using windows for a lot of the stuff since recompiling all this crap for mp3 was just a waste of time. And yeah I know about livna but nobody seems to know wtf they are doing over there with regards to certain peices of "non-mainstream" software.

Re:mp3 support finally...?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean about livna? I don't think it overrides any core packages in purpose. If it does it, it is because the new package adds some mp3-like feature (totem for example).

Who cares

[101percent]

Who cares about fedora its a shitty distro. Its pale in comparison to slackware, and even debian and gentoo.

Re:Who cares

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

What an insightful and thought-provoking, yet witty comment. Do you have a newsletter I could subscribe to?

Seriously, I don't use RH/Fedora myself but that doesn't stop me from realising that there are a lot of people that do use them. A lot people who think they're fine distros. If you are going to disagree with them, at least make some real arguments. I'll give you an extra point if those arguments have some connection to this spin-off.

Fedora is teh sucketh distro!

[v3xt0r]

So is redhat, even SuSE is better, but all-in-all, mainstream linux distros suck.

Use core, make your own. fuck'em all if they don't have a clue! =0

No

[poofyhairguy82]

Is this because ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] is gaining popularity and large number of GNOME developres are in ubuntu camp?

I don't think it's because of outside pressure. Ubuntu is a good thing for Redhat (it hammers out Gnome and new apps just like Fedora does) and I bet Redhat likes someone else carring the free Gnome banner every now and then. The vacuum in that area prompted them to create Fedora in the first place.

I bet that this move was made because Redhat wants to give users more control in Fedora to stop some of the infighting from taking place. When I stopped using Fedora (right after core 3) it seems that the official and unofficial repos were fighting each other. With this new plan the outsiders that worked so hard on their own repos can contribute to the main project instead.

Debian for Servers, Ubuntu for Desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent poster is correct about Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is Debian, but with some more-up-to-date libraries and applications, to optimize it for the desktop.

Debian, on the other hand, is focussed on stability, which makes it a great server distribution.

Thus, you will not see many Ubuntu-based web servers, because the administrator who uses Ubuntu on his desktop will choose vanilla Debian for his webserver, to get the maximum stability.

Debian also works quiet well for the desktop (I use it), but you either have to wait a while to get some of the newer applications, or you have to work a little harder to get them sooner (e.g. pull them from the "Debian Unstable" repository). Of course, in choosing to run the newer applications, you sacrifice a little stability, which is the same trade-off that all the desktop distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, etc.) are making.

Please Stop Whining

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of KDE-only, or KDE-by-default distributions, including Mandrake, Xandros, Linspire, and Knoppix. Slackware recently became KDE-only, and some people created Kubuntu, a KDE version of Ubuntu.

So why are you so worried about Red Hat? Is it against some unwritten law for anyone to prefer Gnome? Are Gnome-based distributions not allowed?

Red Hat and Fedora are primarily Gnome-based. Deal with it!

You have your KDE distributions. Stop complaining, and allow the Gnome people the freedom to have their distributions.

Re:Please Stop Whining

[Anonymous Coward]

10x10!

slow down jack

[Anonymous Coward]

The brim keeps the rain off your face, whereas a Debian tin-foil skullcap doesn't.

the skullcap is still not fully tested

our current stable is made of copper and based on the bicorne

Re:slow down jack

[dolson]

Just don't cut yourself on the bleeding edge if you use the new bronze models. Cut my finger wide open trying to take it off for a shower. That'll teach me to shower.

Ahah

[Anonymous Coward]

Only that gentoo is really not server oriented, wich you would know if you knew what you're talking about.

Being a huge gentoo suporter (as opposed to 'fanboy') I am not convinced that this distro is the one for a server. I am (having tried a few) sure that gen is the best desktop distro for (fairly) advanced users available out there. But compiling on a production server, for each and every update is just not acceptable, and the whole "compile in test environment, then migrate the binaries" scheme just doesn't fit the picture.

For those kinds of purposes (prod environments), I am convinced that Debian is still the best choice: fast and coherent updates in the stable branch, strong comunity for support...
Anyway, thanks for repeating _the_ oldest gentoo troll available, you've just showed that gentoo oponents are just as dumb as gentoo ricers..

So long and thx for all the fish.

Sid *is* unstable! (nt)

[Anonymous Coward]

(see subject)

OLD

[PunkOfLinux]

this is OLD NEWS