Red Hat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation

rob writes " Computer Business Review is reporting that Red Hat has announced plans to hand over control of its Fedora community-led Linux development project to the new Fedora Foundation as part of a new three-pronged intellectual property strategy. "

Comments

How does this benefit RH?

[bcmm]

Is this so that they can release their paid-for version and still fullfill their obligations under the GPL at less cost?

Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

This is coming from a user who has been casually been trying to get into Linux since Red Hat 6.2, and has each time gone back to Windows. I still like it, but there is a ton of shit that bugs me about it:

1) No unification in package management. RPM is flawed (hi dependancy hell), and YUM is only a bandaid on the solution. DEB is great, but only debian based distributions support it. Windows may have multiple companies doing install programs, but at least they're all doing mostly the same thing.
2) The reliance of many people on "source only". Please. I don't want to download ten million different libraries and go through the hastle, however small you may argue it is, to build from source. I want to download this piece of software, install it, and get on with my life.
3) Alt-Tab. I don't care how yuo do it, but I want to be able to alt tab from a full screen graphical program to another graphical screen (not a console).
4) Drivers. There isn't much that can be done about this, but unless you're masachistic, you're basically forced to use an nVidia video card to get accelerated X. I want my piece of shit Intel EXTREME onboard graphics card to run accelerated X too.
5) GTK themes vs. KDE themes. I don't care if you like programing with GTK 2/+ or with QT libraries, but would it kill you to figure out some easy way to make the actual windows look somewhat similar? I have my awesome theme for KDE, I don't want to do some stupid hack that doesn't work 100% or wait for the author to convert the same theme to GNOME to get my graphical programs to display the same. Oh, and on a side note, can you please figure out why KDE's sound system is so terrible. I do not want to wait a few minutes for KDE to let go of the sound system so I can fucking start Neverwinter Nights.
6) man pages. Explain the contents of a man page for a basic command to a casual user. If he is utterly confused, rewrite it. At least group the fuctions into 'most used' and 'never use in a million years'
7) Configuration. It's easy if you know exactly where in the mess of configuration files on your system a certain file is (usually /etc, which is good) and what it's named (HAHAHAHA, good luck). Or if you know exactly where the configuration utilites are on your computer (most likely in a console, and most likely named this really long name in a really obscure directory that you'll never remember when you need to)
8) Cockyness of it's fans. No, I don't have a reason to switch, other than curiosity. Granted, Microsoft zealots are just as bad, and have less well founded opinions, but that doesn't mean free software zealots are right, just a tiny bit less idiodic.
9) Documentation. The really easy to do stuff seems to be well documented and on every single Linux help site. And a UNIX or Linux pro is certainly a good help. But the step between basic end user and power user seems to be vast, and it's only gotten a little smaller over the years (thank god 90% of my hardware is finally being detected these days at least). Something like the Linux Wiki at LinuxQuestions.org, except on a much larger scale and more all-encompasing would be VERY useful. Even if I've been wrong a few above points (and yes, I've used Linux recently) can you people please update your god damned documentation so I don't have to have these misconceptions.

I do consider myself truely free. I owe my alligence to no one, and I've been on both sides of the fence, and made up my mind that XP better suited my needs than Linux did. That doesn't mean that Linux is bad, or Windows XP is perfect either.

Re:If by "belly up" you mean...

[stor]

continuing to provide updates to legacy redhat/fedora systems since their inception, then I guess you are right.

I'm a Red Hat fan but if the above is true please tell me where to get security update RPMs for RedHat 8.0. At the moment I'm building SRPMs of Apache2 and the dependencies I have to fulfil are staggering. Automake, autoconf, pcre, etc need to be updated. This is going to take me a day to update Apache because I need to compile all this stuff.

Debian seems to handle this situation a whole lot better.

Cheers
Stor