Slashdot Mirror
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_
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.
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."
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.
oh you know .. no one big.
Google
Toyota
Sony
Ameritrade
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?
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.
Is this just a hunch, or do you have hard numbers?
They sell stuff. Specifically, RHEL, and support for it.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
I wonder what lessons, if any, Red Hat has learned from the past two years, and if they would do it all over again?
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
This is good news. Next, we need "Full Democracy" in selecting foundation officials. We could adopt Debian's approach.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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?
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
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.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
It's called Risk Management.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
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.
I wonder what will happen to Fedora legacy support with RH out of the picture?
-Turkey
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.
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).
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.
Free MacMini
"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
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
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.
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?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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
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".
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.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
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
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
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.)
"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.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I was talking more about the theory than what they've actually done I guess.... I'm a gentoo user myself :P
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
With sparkling wit like that I cannot believe you are posting anonymously.
Shout your name from the rooftops. Fame awaits !
"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.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.
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?
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.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It means that Red Hat will phase out its engineering and financial support for Fedora once it has slipped off the radar screen.
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?
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.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
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.
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.
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".
Open Source Java DAO Generator
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
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. ;)
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.
Who cares about fedora its a shitty distro. Its pale in comparison to slackware, and even debian and gentoo.
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.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
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.
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.
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.
IBM
... Anyone want to bet smaller companies do, too? Say ... SCO?
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?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
Open Source Sushi
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.
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.
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.
I believe you mispelled 'flame' :)
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
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.
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.