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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."
What advantages does it have over other distros (Debian, por ejemplo)?
I see nothing on Redhat's site or the Fedora site about this.
Wouldn't that be the first place I should be looking?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Is this because ubuntu is gaining popularity and large number of GNOME developres are in ubuntu camp?
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?
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
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_
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.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
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.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
"You've never heard of slashdot?"
"I know it makes websites not work."
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?
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.
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.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
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.
-jpowers
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?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
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.
.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."
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
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...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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. ;)