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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."
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."
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
oh you know .. no one big.
Google
Toyota
Sony
Ameritrade
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.
The brim keeps the rain off your face, whereas a Debian tin-foil skullcap doesn't.
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
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.
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?
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
"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.
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
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.
My other car is a Popemobile
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
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.
With sparkling wit like that I cannot believe you are posting anonymously.
Shout your name from the rooftops. Fame awaits !
And it's inaccurate to claim that RH will be out of the picture.
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"
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!)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
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?
> 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. ;)
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.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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.