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