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Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

Posted by Zonk on from the growing-up dept.

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."

4 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Ubuntu ? by anandpur · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Ubuntu ? by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

  2. Re:how do they make money? by birder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat. by Erwos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.