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

dupe

[professorhojo]

seems like a dupe: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 1712208&tid=110&tid=106

Re:dupe

[pez]

Perhaps I'm being overly naiive and/or simplistic, but isn't the "Mysterious future" feature supposed to eliminate dupes? I saw this one coming half an hour ago... certainly someone reported it as a dupe, no?

Re:dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

but isn't the "Mysterious future" feature supposed to eliminate dupes?

You must be new here :-)

Re:dupe

[RetepMc]

And with the handy "Goggle Slashdot" box at the bottom of the screen, finding dupes is that much easier.

Re:dupe

[professorhojo]

i did.

but it had no effect obviously.

Re:dupe

[daniil]

See, young man, while some of us can see into the past, our powers are still limited. If, for instance, the previous article is just two articles down on the front page (like it happened to be in one particular case a few days ago), the dupe is easy to notice. But the longer the timeframe between the two -- the further to the past we have to look -- the less accurate the results will be.

Re:dupe

[mbadolato]

"Goggle Slashdot"

Does that make you drink beer until Slashdot stories/dupes look better?? :)

Re:dupe

[m50d]

Yep. Just like it eliminates spelline errors in stories.

Re:dupe

[Ithika]

Yep, but it does nothing to help when you roll over in a strange bed the next morning and you're lying next to a -1, Troll :)

Re:dupe

[pez]

You must be new here :-)

Says the AC to /. user ID #54 :-)

What is official RH distro then?

[moz25]

What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[ColonelKernel]

Fedora, since its inception, was its own distribution. Redhat created Fedora to help mantain a free (as in beer) distribution based on Redhat. The official Redhat distribution will be as it has since the beginning of the Fedora project. The Redhat branded products, such as AS, ES, and WS will be the Redhat official releases. What Redhat in effect is doing is creating a division between Redhat and the Fedora project much like the division between Redhat and SuSE.

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[maynard]

Note that the source rpm packages for all the Redhat Enterprise editions are still publicaly available - as per GPL requirements. While Redhat won't give you free binaries, there are plenty of places that will. If you're looking for Redhat Enterprise 3 or 4, try: Scientific Linux. It's basically just a recompile of all the Redhat packages with some bundled scientific software (which you can easily remove). I've got SL3 deployed on about a hundred and fifty desktop hosts and it's rock solid. --M

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[Jack Taylor]

What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?

Fedora has always been a separate distro, ever since Fedora Core 1 was released in 2003. Red Hat wanted more external developers to work on their code, but if I have been following things correctly, many developers were wary of contributing as Red Hat still had the final say of what was included and what wasn't. Hence Red Hat wanting to completely separate Fedora from the company instead of just the commercial arm of the company - they win the developers' trust, they can still have their individual developers input in the distro, and can still use the resulting code.

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[tux_deamon]

what Redhat in effect is doing is creating a division between Redhat and the Fedora project much like the division between Redhat and SuSE.

Not exactly. Fedora is essentially the groundwork for future editions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Yes, they are different distros, but the division is not that significant. Structurally, they are very much the same.

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[Obyron]

That question will be answered in the ever-elusive Fourth Prong.

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[sapgau]

That sounds worth a try, thanks!

Re:What is official RH distro then?

[Dr. Evil]

It's more free than free beer. Redhat has no more right to Linux than you or I. It is important for them to keep Fedora moving so as to continue to have the development community behind them.

And while Fedora and the RHEL/RHAS/RHWhatever technically sprang from the older "RedHat" model, last I checked, RHEL/RHAS/RHWhatever derive from Fedora.

Spinning off Fedora is wise on the part of Redhat. Now the window of opportunity for Novell to strike up SuSE marketshare through Redhat alienating the community is closed.

Have fun with your own real open source fedora

[jurt1235]

Finally a competitor for Debian, or is it just to much for Red Hat to keep investing in a release for users.
Not that Debian is a pure user release, but at least it is completely assembled by them.

Fedora Core 3 sucks

[phatrice]

it froze on me more often than Windows 98...

Re:Fedora Core 3 sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolls scare it...

Re:Fedora Core 3 sucks

[rubycodez]

it's your abilities as a Linux admin that suck. The open source OS community doesn't want you, reinstall Windows now, or buy a Mac.

Re:Fedora Core 3 sucks

[bcmm]

No, his abilities as a Windows 98 admin are 1337.

Time for a new /. slogan!

[dark-br]

News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered.

Re:Time for a new /. slogan!

[alexhs]

News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered.

That slogan seems a dupe to me.

And each time submitted by the same editor, dark-br. ;-)

Re:Time for a new /. slogan!

[smithtodda]

Wouldn't it be:

News for the amnesiac. Stuff that matters again.

Why not using KDE ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why Red Hat or Fedora still set their money on GNOME ? After watching this small movie I decided to switch over to KDE and I was impressed how mature KDE is. I wish every person switching from Windows should give KDE the first try.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Enoch Lockwood]

I wonder why Red Hat or Fedora still set their money on GNOME ?

Maybe it's because there are plenty of people like me who love Gnome. It's innovative, it works and looks great, too.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

Because companies making expensive propriety apps (Oracle et al) prefer people to be using gnome so they don't have to license qt. And people who are buying to run such apps are redhat's core market. Someone who's spending $5000 on their database prog is more likely to be willing to pay $2000 for their OS, especially if it's the only one being officially supported by makers of said expensive OS. By using gnome redhat encourages Oracle etc. not to support other linux distros.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

How can you call it innovative when the sole purpose of its existence is to provide a replacement for KDE? Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good things about gnome, and you should use it if you like them, but being innovative isn't one of them.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[suitepotato]

As an addition, KDE's guts start and run just fine for most KDE based apps while in Gnome and they run their little windows full of goodness just perfectly. I even have various KDE based things start up at logon to Gnome. Not sure what the muss and fuss are other than KDE has superior controls over the desktop and some neat special effects.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

The problem is gnome distros are so rabidly anti-kde, often refusing to ship it until enough pressure is put on them by people who actually try and use their computers. You don't get it in the other direction. Gnome spreading fud about qt licensing 4 years on is one reason, but it can't be the only thing, can it?

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Samrobb]

Because companies making expensive propriety apps (Oracle et al) prefer people to be using gnome so they don't have to license qt.

Oh, man. I was going to let this pass, but... man. You're just plain wrong. Licensing QT is nothing for even a small company, let alone Oracle. Face it, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis - if the cost of supporting KDE was less than they money they could make by supporting it, they'd do it. Simple as that.

As it stands, though, Oracle and other major companies are not at all interested in choosing sides between KDE and Gnome. What they're interested in is choosing which distributions they will run on. The desktop environment is almost completely irrelevant to them. It was RedHat that choose to use Gnome as a default environment. IIRC, this was more of a political decision than anything else - no complaints on my part, mind you: I like both Gnome and KDE. But to imply that RedHat choose Gnome over KDE just because Oracle and other companies wanted to save a few grand is all-out wrong.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, Oracle's GUI tools are purely Java-based (even for Windows). It's got nothing to do with which desktop environment, as long as Java Swing runs.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Because companies making expensive propriety
> apps (Oracle et al) prefer people to be using
> gnome so they don't have to license qt.

I think, If companies like Nokia or Google are able to donate $50.000 to the GNOME foundation that these companies have no issues paying QT licenses either. 50k means 33.33 QT licenses and probably they would got even more licenses for the same amount of money.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[memmel2]

I don't think this is true. Generally I think Redhat chooses Gnome because they feel that the future is in higher level languages and since Gnomes object model is written in C it can be altered to match the needs of high level languages such as Python java C# etc. C++ on the other hand does not have this flexibility. The GCJ implementors chose the route of using the C++ object model and its not been a resounding success people are not writing C++ java objects in general.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone! Please give this guy a cluebat!

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

I very much doubt that. Qt's python bindings are superb and have been for a long time, while the gtk ones are only recently getting up to scratch. Now with C# gnome is ahead, but redhat went to gnome far before all the fuss about mono. I don't think it's that

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME is ahead of what ? The entire architecture is a bloddy mess and fixing it would require huge code refactoring or major rewrite. I know what I am talking here since I spent a couple of years with GNOME and hacking.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[phoenix.bam!]

You're right. The reason is probably because Red Hat didn't want to be bound to Qt and Trolltech is my guess.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

Gnome is ahead when it comes to C# support, that's all.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Pros_n_Cons]

Because it costs too much money to support two desktops.
Most (smart) distro's try to only officially 'support' one app. only firefox, only xine, only OOffice. If someone thinks K office is better then its still there but most of that development was done by a KDEish distro. and if someone on SUSe thinks gedit is better most of that work comes from RedHat guys. see how it works? we don't have to do aggressive development on every application included in the OS. they do the aggressive development in the direction they want to go, but include the apps other shops are aggressivly developing.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Tony Hoyle]

Wrong. you've never worked for a small/medium size company have you?

If you're producing an app then as a developer you have to fight for *Every* penny that gets spent. That means if you have the choice of using GTK for $0 or QT for $500 (or whatever it costs) you'll use GTK. Not because it's too expensive, but because the pain of justifying the expense is too great, will take about a month and cause you to miss your deadline.

(example: At one job we had 5 developers working for 2 weeks to track down a memory leak that boundschecker could have found in about an hour. We'd already spent 6 months trying to justify the cost of devpartner and it had been thrown out again... companies have a strange view of costs - by my reckoning that one bug cost them $50,000 out of the developer (or 'resources') budget but spending $1000 out of the software budget was too much... different line in the spreadsheet).

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[Samrobb]

Wrong. you've never worked for a small/medium size company have you?

First - the discussion wasn't about me or my work history; it was about whether or not Oracle's desire to save a few bucks per developer was the reason that RedHat went with Gnome over KDE. I don't know if you consider Oracle to be a "small/medium sized company"; I certainly don't.

Second - yes, I have worked for small companies my entire adult life (modulo a short stint in the US Navy.) The largest company I've ever worked for consisted of less than 250 people. I have never had a problem getting the tools I needed to do a good job; whether those were compilers, product libraries, source control systems, defect tracking systems, debuggers, memory profilers, licensing protection libraries, automated test tools, or what have you. The whole purpose of my employment, in every case, was to make money for the company. If you can show that investing $2000 per developer per year in some random development library (like QT) is likely to shave 10-12 developer-months off of a project, for example, it doesn't take a whole lot of selling to convince someone that those kind of tools are an advantage.

If you're producing an app then as a developer you have to fight for *Every* penny that gets spent.

Maybe I'm just lucky, and every single one of the last four companies I've worked for has been unusual. Honestly, though, I don't think so. Getting approval for something in a smaller company is easier than getting approval in a large company - it certainly doesn't "take about a month and cause you to miss your deadline", as you say. There is usually just one or two people (owner/CEO/CTO) that you need to convince about the worthiness of an expenditure. If you're prepared to make a case, and can clearly demonstrate how something will be of value, then you can get a yes or no answer from a decent CTO in less than an hour. If he says no, then drop it. If he says yes, the two of you will probably spend 10 minutes getting a yes or no from the CEO. If you can't manage all of that and get a yes/no answer and budget approval in less than 2 days time for a tool you're already familiar with, then there's something wrong...

...by my reckoning that one bug cost them $50,000 out of the developer (or 'resources') budget but spending $1000 out of the software budget was too much ...different line in the spreadsheet).

...and there it is. If you're being told that spending $1,000 to save the company $50,000 is impossible because it would put you overbudget in some category, someone in the company is a fool who doesn't understand the value of money - and it doesn't sound like you.

If you take a great deal of pride in your work, you may want to quit and find someplace where they're able to hire managers that can understand complex statements like "50 is larger than 1". On the other hand, if a job's a job is a job to you, you might want to shrug and continue sucking money out of them as long as you can, taking solace in the idea that you're at least managing to contain those infected with "bumbling idiot manager disease", keeping them safely quarantined within your current company.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

But the gnome distros often don't even include KDE. Major gnome distros: Redhat/Fedora, Sun JDS, Ubuntu, possibly Debian. JDS still doesn't include KDE, Redhat didn't for a while until their users insisted, Ubuntu similar. (Way back, Debian didn't. It was dependent on non-free Qt but surely they could have put it in contrib. Anyway, water under the bridge now). Major kde distros: Mandrake/Mandriva, SUSE, possibly Slackware (I'm leaving livecds out of this). While pat has grumbled and they may not officially support it, all of them include gnome if you want to install it.

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[ratboy666]

GNOME *may* owe its existence to being a replacement for KDE.

But...

- It draws "better" Less pixels refreshed, which means its better remoted than KDE.

- Its object model is CORBA. More widely supported.

- Just my opinion, but it just looks better.

- Easily locked down desktops

Ratboy

Re:Why not using KDE ?

[m50d]

Integrated NX makes KDE the fastest remote desktop with complete menus and stuff I've seen.

Corba is less widely supported overall, because it has to be specifically included, so far from all applications within gnome support it. DCOP gets added to actions with zero effort from developers, with the result that even if they're all within KDE, overall there's more applications using DCOP than CORBA. And since both are moving to standardised DBUS it won't make much difference canyway.

How can you say that? It's so horribly bland. You can change the theme, but there aren't any good ones that ship with gnome, leaving you relying on look that may become unavailable with the next version if the author can't be bothered to port it. KDE gives you the choice of about five genuinely different widget looks in its startup wizard, there's something to suit most tastes.

Really? I haven't seen much fuss made about that, wheras kde's kiosk has had a lot of work and big deployments in German museums.

Fresh Dupe

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Come on guys, not only is this a "dupe", it's a dupe from only this weekend.

Re:Fresh Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only, is it a dupe from only this weekend, two of the three links are the same.

Re:Fresh Dupe

[Sturm]

Do duplicate stories in some way, shape or form hurt you? Do they cause evil or bad fortune to descend upon you and your family? Do they offend your delicate sense of what is good and just in the universe? Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass?
If you answered "No" to all the above questions, maybe you should quit your whiny-ass bitching about duplicate stories and contribute something meaninful to another discussion.

Re:Fresh Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm not a subscriber either.

Must cost a lot to run slashdot. I guess as long as enough fools like myself bother coming here, the ad revenue might defray it a bit. 'course they even have to take money from Microsoft.

Re:Fresh Dupe

[mangu]

Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass?

Oh, so *that's* where these damn pimples come from!

Re:Fresh Dupe

[maw]

Some people don't like mediocrity, and are frustrated by the suspicion that just a little bit more work (checking for duplicate stories, editing submissions, etc) would make the site a lot better.

(Above, I use the word "suspicion" because most people don't know what it's like to run a site so large, and can only speculate.)

The faq says they want to get the stories out fast, but that's bogus.

Headline should say...

[poopie]

Redhat still trying to figure out how to lure the opensource community back.

Re:Headline should say...

[doublem]

Open source community trying to figure out how to get Red Has to stop calling and calling, even though OSS has given Red Hat every possible signal that it's no longer interested.

Damn stalker distros.

Re:Headline should say...

[Enoch Lockwood]

Really? When did the Open Source community leave RedHat?

RH is a model of a successful Open Source company. I, for one, would love to work for such a company after I graduate.

Re:Headline should say...

[m50d]

Ages ago, because they were rather heavy-handed with their trademarks. But recently the Fedora project has just generated confusion. It's supposed to be community-oriented - but doesn't seem to have any more community involvement than redhat did. Remember that "IRC log" posted a while back showing the community's frustration with the whole business?

Re:Headline should say...

[tux_deamon]

Why was the parent modded troll?

Open source is the foundation for Red Hat's business model. Everything they release is available for you and I to use in anything we want. In fact, they acquire other software and release it under the GPL. And so what if they've learned how to create a profitable business using and developing OSS? Good for them. Everybody wins.

Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[GnuPooh]

What I really want to know is will MPlayer ever be an official Fedora Extra package? I know the answer as long as Red Hat controls it is "No, there are patents and other questionably legal stuff in MPlayer". However, other distros like Debian ship it (anyone else like to comment on others like Gentoo?). However, with this change separating it from Red Hat is it possible that Extras could get some of these "Rogue" packages?

Personally, I think the answer is a solid "maybe".

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I really want to know is will MPlayer ever be an official Fedora Extra package? I know the answer as long as Red Hat controls it is "No, there are patents and other questionably legal stuff in MPlayer". However, other distros like Debian ship it (anyone else like to comment on others like Gentoo?). However, with this change separating it from Red Hat is it possible that Extras could get some of these "Rogue" packages?

Personally, I think the answer is a solid "maybe".

I hope the answer is a solid never.

The point is, you're not supposed to distribute GPL'd software if you don't have rights to the software patents contained within. In the case of mplayer, one cannot even begin to list the number of patents that it infringes. Not only that, as we all know software patents are or will soon be enforceable in most of Europe. This leaves very few countries with high visibility where this software could be used. Since most of Europe and the US won't be able to use them, I see little point in distributing something of legal questionability.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[Wesley Felter]

I suspect either the Fedora Foundation will say "we can't afford to ask the lawyers if we can do it" or they'll ask Red Hat's lawyers who will just say no again.

Besides, Fedora prefers GStreamer and Helix.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[wackysootroom]

Does Debian really ship Mplayer? I thought you had to get it from the Marillat repositories? I thought mplayer was not officially supported by Debian.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[suitepotato]

Does it matter? I've followed every permutation of every instruction I could find and while it installs just fine by way of yum, it never ever runs.

Same notation for Real Player. In fact, just like with Windows, the latest version installs just fine, but it opens and then immediately dies less than one second later.

Xine on the other hand actually has a better track record at running everything than VLC does. As long as I have Xine and the codec package I'm plenty happy.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[m50d]

They don't ship it, and packages that depend on it go in contrib. I wonder why, since it's open source. Surely they could at least put it in nonus or something? It can't be of questionable legality everywhere.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[bankman]

Here you can find a summary of the mplayer-debian status.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[MasterOfMagic]

Debian does not ship mplayer for two reasons: first, the official reason: there are too many legal issues that they do not wish to tackle. Second, in the past, maintaners, developers, and contacts with mplayer have resulted in more heat than light, for example this message.

Though there is an attempt to resolve these issues. Documentation of these efforts is avaliable on one of the Debian developer's websites.

Re:Will MPlayer ever be a Fedora Extra package?

[Tony Hoyle]

Debian doesn't ship mplayer - it's not in unstable or even non-free.

It's just that some people have made .deb packages for it. They're unofficial though.

Nother dupe...

[Shads]

... seems to be an unusual ammount of them lately. Wonder what's going on?

Re:Nother dupe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently Hemos didn't read Slashdot this weekened when Zonk had the reigns :P

Re:Nother dupe...

[Anonymous Coward]

an unusual ammount

Why do you cal this amount "unusual"? There seems to be a lot of them, which means "situation normal, all fucked up".

Re:Nother dupe...

[Shads]

Cuz I saw more in 2-3 days than I normally see in a week?

Fedora Core 4

[richman555]

Wasn't Fedora Core 4 supposed to be released today and taken out of beta?

Re:Fedora Core 4

[tuffy]

Wasn't Fedora Core 4 supposed to be released today and taken out of beta?

At one point, yes. But the date's been pushed back to next week.

Re:Fedora Core 4

[LDoggg_]

It was delayed a week.
Here's the public release schedule.

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?

Re:How does this benefit RH?

[m50d]

They're hoping to get the community to produce more of their OS for them. That's all.

Re:How does this benefit RH?

[SirTalon42]

RedHat already fullfills their obligations under the GPL and then some. Anyone is free to download the source of RHEL.

Re:How does this benefit RH?

[grumbel]

Is there enough community left to do that? After all there is already Debian (and its forks) and Gentoo and while neither of them is perfect, they work rather well. I fail to see how Fedora provides anything different enough that isn't already provided by one of the other community driven distros.

Yup, yup, yup.....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 1712208&tid=110&tid=106

I just hope it's not the classic 3 prong strategy

[Weaselmancer]

1) Do something.
2) ???
3) Profit!

Pretty Girl Photo

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute friend of mine--real hottie!
http://community.webshots.com/photo/226073165/2260 73165aThRno

Typical Slashdot Cheat Sheet

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Post a story from some other web site. 2. Post it again a day or two later. 3. ... 4. Profit!

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:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

We can all see how setup.exe, MSI, Installshield, NSIS, and WISE have all caused the demise of Windows as a serious application platform. Linux has to avoid this fragmentation at all costs!

And when did you last use linux where alt-tab didn't work? 1991? You make a few good points, but I think it's solely by accident.

Re:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Codename_V]

I really gotta step in here, I just can't take this kind of ignorance.

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.

With the availability of so many rpm frontends, how is it that this "rpm dependency hell" myth persists? And how praytell do you figure .deb files are any different than rpms? Listen real closely this time everyone. An .rpm file is basically the exact same thing as a .deb file. Without a front end like apt you'd have the same dependency hell on Debian. You don't like yum, then fine, use urpmi or yast or up2date or apt or whatever other rpm frontend I forgot to mention.

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.

If other people prefer source packages, how in the world does it follow that you need to use source packages? I've gotten by just fine for years on Red Hat/Fedora without source packages.

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).

So in a nutshell you want Linux to act like Windows? There's nothing preventing you from setting it up to do just that. In fact (and someone correct me if I'm wrong here) this is exactly the behavior that KDE defaults to. And if you want to get even more Windows-like then use a Windows Clone like Xandros or Linspire.

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.

And I suppose if Intel didn't support your card under Windows then that would be all Microsoft's fault?

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.

And now sit there with a straight face and tell me every application you use on Windows has the exact same theme if you will. Even if you limit yourself strictly to Microsoft products you'll find large inconsistancies between various applications. That being said, with Red Hat's bluecurve theme, without knowing beforehand due to naming or whathave you, I can't tell Gnome and KDE applications apart at all really. Or at least it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb like you seem to indicate.

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.

I'll agree there, that sound under Linux can be painful at times. But then I've noticed a huge improvement with the latest releases of Fedora. That and perhaps you shouldn't blame KDE for the faults of your Neverwinter Nights application.

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'

First of all, Linux shells, bash and the like, are not some dumbed down shell like you'll find on Windows. The Linux cli is very very powerful. That being the case the documentation on using it can seem a bit complicated at times. I do agree that i

Re:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

Source only is good. Dependancies are horrible indeed. Projects that distribute source should have special tarballs with all the deps included -- in source. pyGTK for one.

Re:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Tony Hoyle]

OK who rated this 'interesting'?

It's just a troll that posts the same damned thing in every story he can find.

Re:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dependency Hell"

May I respond to this with lamer kiddie speak?

ROFL OMG LOL!!!111 U R 2 GAY LOLOLOLOL!!!!11111!!!

Seriously though, that is, all kidding and snarkiness aside:

What is dependency hell?

Answer: Dependencies are making sure that components the program/package/library you are installing are actually on the system.

It's a way of saying "hey dummy, you need this for the program to run. If you don't install these first, your program won't work, then you will be crying a river over how mplayer won't run"

In short: dependency checking keeps you from shooting yourself in the foot. Is it better to try running the program, only to see nothing happen when you try launching it from the menu? Or, if you're savvy enough to launch it from an xterm to see what's wrong, find that lib.foo.xbar.so.2.2.2.1 isn't present, so you have to manually hunt that down, compile it, find that IT depends on yet OTHER files before it itself will compile, and once you get lib.foo.xbar.so.2.2.2.1 installed, you find that mplayer now won't run because you're missing widget.foo.bar.xvid.so.3.3.5.2

No, it's better for most users (technical and nontechnical alike, barring the elitist "who needs a GUI" I'm-better-than-you-are jerkoffs stuck in the '70s mindset, to provide a mechanism with dependency checking which tells you in a friendly way:

"You need lib.foo.2.2.2.1 and widget.foo.bar 3.3.5.2. Do you want to:

1. Not install mplayer
2. install lib.foo.2.2.2.1 and widget.foo.bar 3.3.5.2
3. Ignore and install anyhow?"

This gives you the best of both worlds. If you're the masochist who thrives on the old-school method manually downloading each source package, compiling, spending hours resolving each dependency as you go, patching the code when it breaks, and THEN installing mplayer, more power to you.

Meanwhile, those who actually want to run mplayer and not go through configure/make dep/make/make install 101 will be running mplayer, happilly watching their legally-purchased DVDs in under two minutes, while you are cursing your various gods for several hours.

Which is better? Sersiously! The elitist "real men compile everything" shit is pointless and only drives the masses away from Linux and Unix.

Even if your distribution doesn't allow you to -force an install (do any RPM builds actually prevent force?), it's not a problem for you if you are so inclined to compile, because hey: only lamers install prebuilt packages, right?

Sheesh. To some people computers are tools used to solve problems and reduce workloads, not introduce new problems and create more work.

kimSpamno@biyn.n05p4/\/\.com

Re:Linux and Free Software are not perfect

[stor]

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).

Alt-Tab switches between X11 apps in Fedora. The behaviour is practically identical to Windows. I switch between full screen mplayer/ogle and apps like Evolution/Firefox all the time.

Doesn't this work for you?

Cheers
Stor

Dupe Posting Protest

[Blahbooboo3]

Rather then posting on this topic, let's all do a virtual "sit-in" and just not respond to this posting! :)

Re:Dupe Posting Protest

[flood6]

Rather then posting on this topic, let's all do a virtual "sit-in" and just not respond to this posting! :)

I'm with you!

Re:Dupe Posting Protest

[/dev/trash]

Me too!

fixed link

[maynard]

*sigh* Sorry about that. It's http://scientificlinux.org. --M

I call that...

[dark-br]

refactoring! And at least I'm refactoring myself ;)

Redhat drops the ball again

[Fwoggus]

Redhat has really screwed up with their ever changing strategy concerning their OS. They decide to ditch out on providing a free version of RH for none enterprise people. Then ditched out on supporting older versions and instead tell people to use the fedoralegacy project for security updates. Then the fedoralegacy project pretty much goes belly up. I have switched all my servers over to Debian and the last hold out will be switched when the current project ships in mid-summer.

Re:Redhat drops the ball again

[guacamole]

I am using fedoralegacy. They were slow to get things moving at first but now they seem to provide updates reasonably fast. They did drop support for RedHat 7.2 and 8 due to lack of interest among the developers but they still are supporting 7.3 and 9 as well as Fedora Core 1 and 2.

I'm happy as things are

[suitepotato]

However, that doesn't mean that I'm dead set against this split. I just want to be able to count on Red Hat sticking the best and most stable things that come up in the Fedora world into Red Hat. I also don't want to see a skill forking here where the two diverge so much that they become totally different distros and require doubling my learning load.

I'm happy with FC3 as is, a lot of neat stuff still hasn't been ported from FC2 (./configure, make, make install, lather, rinse, repeat, nope no luck), and now FC4 is on the verge of official dump into the clutches of the users. If this makes things better without making it all less stable and more wonky, then fine.

Who cares

[101percent]

Who cares fedora sucks anyway.

Which open source community was that?

[roystgnr]

Redhat still trying to figure out how to lure the opensource community back.

Are you talking about the open source community that includes people like Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, Havoc Pennington, and Owen Taylor? It never left.

Are you part of a new, anti-RedHat OSS community? What have you written?

Re:Which open source community was that?

[rpdillon]

While your point is valid, so was GP's.

The open source community isn't always centered around enterprise solutions. When RedHat removed their "personal" distro and focused only on enterprise, they alienated a lot of people, even though they continued to contribute to OSS in a big way.

I was one of them...I used RedHat exclusively on all my machines, but the move to Fedora pushed me away (the last FC I tried was .95, and it drove me nuts), and drove me to Debian, and now finally Gentoo, which I have run on all my machines for the past 13 months or so. I don't ever see myself going back to RedHat or Fedora on my main machine, though I may try out FC4 on some spare hardware to see how I like it (I'm sure it has come a *long* way since .95).

Anyway, it was that move that annoyed people in the OS community, and I think it was what GP was referring to.

Re:Which open source community was that?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the heck has everyone been so up-in-arms about? I ran RH5 through RH9 on different servers and upgraded RH9 to FC1 when RedHat switched to Fedora.

FC1 was practically RH10 with one exception: they stopped selling it in a box! (Good God! The horror!) Instead you had to download it or buy it from a place like cheapbytes. Who the hell cares? If you want to send them some money, send them some.

In fact, it was a big improvement. Instead of paying to use the RedHat Network to keep your systems up to date, you can use yum for free.

If you are concerned about not upgrading so often, then don't. Look into the Fedora Legacy project which backports security fixes.

Honestly people, stop complaining so much about free stuff. Jeez.

Re:Which open source community was that?

[tux_deamon]

But Red Hat didn't remove their "personal" distro, they just renamed it "Fedora Core". They've provided a fairly robust infrastructure for supporting it.

And even though the product that pays the bills retains the name "Red Hat", it's as Open Source as any distro you can find. That's why I can download distro's like CentOS and WhiteBox that are exact clones of RHEL developed almost exclusively from the SRPM's released openly by the RHEL project.

If anyone in the OSS community is annoyed by the reoganization, it's probably because it is a little confusing. But this is it in a nutshell:

One product is a cutting edge distro for all of us to enjoy using and developing.

One product is the stable branch of an older version of the community disto that's packaged and sold with support to big corporations who gain from chosing the software.

There's nothing wrong with selling OSS. Consider RMS:

"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover cost.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." - Richard Stallman

Red Hat employs developers who not only use OSS, but contribute a great deal of it back to the community for all of us to enjoy -- even those of us who don't run Red Hat distributions personally. Again, RMS:

"Red Hat's contributing to the GNU project by hiring people to write on the GNU desktop, Gnome, which is a very useful contribution."

Re:Which open source community was that?

[rpdillon]

I wasn't going to reply, but I feel compelled to.

First, I never objected to selling Open Source Software. You're simply misreading me in that regard.

Second, I never said that their enterprise distro wasn't open. It has been, and as far as I can tell, will continue to be.

My beef is that they took a product I most valued them for (a desktop, personal OS) and made a move that *reduced* their ownership of that product. They handed is back to the community, in effect, offering a substantial amount of support. It was not, as you say, simply a renaming of their current technology. You said yourself that they provided a ""fairly robust" support framework. It would be "totally robust" if they still treated it as *their* product, not the community's product that they have a big hand in creating.

This annoyed me. For some distros, I *want* company ownership. I want SuSe to sell a "professional" version that is officially supported for consumer level end-users. I wanted Red Hat to continue to sell their desktop version of the OS, providing support all the way. Companies that offer those products to *individual* end users are an asset to the community.

I viewed Red Hat's move as a step away from that ownership, which was accurate, in light of this latest news. They were backing off from that market, and continue to, as this news indicates. This is what annoyed me, and what I was referring to.

As to the other guy who says I'm bitching about free stuff, well, call me crazy, but I like having some commercial alternatives for end users, and some free alternatives. I don't know if you guys used Fedora .95 (or even Core 1) after using Red Hat 9, but it was not the same product. I simply didn't want to see THE commercial end user Linux desktop OS turn to pure-free. That's what Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and a thousand others are for. I liked having SuSe, Red Hat and Xandros out there, sitting on a shelf for sale. Then when I try to tell my dad to try Linux and he asks "But is there support I can call if I need help?" I can say "Yes, there is!" I would have liked to do that with Red Hat, but it is simply not an option as it was but before the Fedora switch (sites like http://support.marko.net/ notwithstanding).

Re:Gentoo

[Hex4def6]

Yeah its in portage (as is its horrible firefox / mozilla plugin, mplayerplug-in)

If by "belly up" you mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yes, they had their problems in the beginning, but that hardly constitutes going "belly up."

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

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

[ratboy666]

Stor

I *you* want to support RH8.0 on fedoralegacy, go ahead and volunteer.

Personally, 8.0 -> 9 was painless, I tried it and didn't have any problems (its the same OS, pretty much).

At the time, I couldn't figure out WHY RH bothered with RH9, instead of just doing RH8.1 (.2, whatever).

It *should* have been a point release.

I recommend that you TAKE the point release 8.0 -> 9, then use fedoralegacy support.

YMMV

Ratboy

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

[stor]

I *you* want to support RH8.0 on fedoralegacy, go ahead and volunteer.

Yeah sure point taken.

Personally, 8.0 -> 9 was painless, I tried it and didn't have any problems (its the same OS, pretty much).

On your home machine?

We're talking about a client server here with all sorts of odd software dependencies and custom modifications. I've told them that addressing that would be beneficial. Upgrading software on this machine is security-critical but will break stuff and I'll have to fix it. That's cool: will do but it's less risky to apply updated packages individually rather than upgrade the OS. Think "rollback".

It means to be safe I'll probably do a fresh OS install on another hard drive and try migrating the services.

Yeah yeah, I'm just having a moan. I have a lot to do other than this. ;)

Cheers
Stor

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

[ratboy666]

No, not home machine -- I would have gone fedora core in that case.

Good luck with the migration.

Ratboy

Re:dupe - expect more of these ...

[Hulkster]

Slashdot Search has said for a few days: "search is down at the moment. Until it's back up, you may wish to search Slashdot through Google"

I'm sure this is a contributing factor to this dupe since the /. Editors aren't able to do their exhaustive searches for dupes that they normally do, plus I'm sure they are busy fixing the broken search functionality ... ;-)

Redhat == Proprietary OS

[mpapet]

I think this move by Red Hat is trying to lock-out free-as-in-beer Linux.

Before I get modded down:
-Red Hat will continue to contribute to Linux.

-Red Hat will still promote most things good for Linux as in patents and other IP issues.

I think they are becoming as proprietary as possible. For example, they recently open-sourced the Fedora Directory Project. http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page

I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way more value (to PHB's) in delivering point-and-click GUI admin than just foo.conf admin. That there might really be IP issues will be the official reason for keeping it proprietary.

Re:Redhat == Proprietary OS

[guacamole]

I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way more value (to PHB's) in delivering point-and-click GUI admin than just foo.conf admin.

If this was the case, then we should have seen, by now, major Linux vendors distributing closed source OpenLDAP, Samba, Apache, etc configuration tools.

Re:Redhat == Proprietary OS

[LnxAddct]

The administration tools are already being released as open source. There is some proprietary code in there from Sun's iPlanet and a few other things that they aren't allowed to release. As a result, Red Hat engineers are spending the next few weeks rewriting the proprietary pieces and then releasing it. You don't give Red Hat enough credit, they are one of the few companies keepign open source moving foward.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Gentoo

[iibagod]

Inclusion in Portage doesn't have to be based on legal issues, as its not considered 'shipping' a program. Any ebuild in Portage is just the script telling you how to install the program, not the program itself. It's like providing you the hyperlink to mplayer's website, but not including it on your cd.

As far as I can tell, mplayer is not included in the GRP list, so it is NOT shipped with Gentoo. The ebuild is there for you to run if you want to install it later, but it isn't shipped with Gentoo.

Re:Gentoo

[/dev/trash]

What's wrong with the plugin? It rocks. Allows me to see all the important parts of the semantic web.

Red Hat is a company, people

[mcrbids]

As a company, it serves its own best interests. It has always been honorable in doing so.

You will not find Red Hat "stealing" OSS code, compiling it into proprietary work, and not telling anybody. You won't find them attempting to "extend" open code with proprietary extensions without releasing those extensions, too.

They pay for a good, healthy staff of developers that work almost solely on GPL and otherwise released code. They release source binaries as though all their stuff was GPL, even with projects that are BSD-ish licensed.

It's not that difficult to take their source RPMs and create your own "Enterprise Linux", as done by Scientific Linux, Cent O/S, and (my favorite) Whitebox Linux.

I don't like that they don't support good old "RedHat Linux" like they used to, but as a company, RedHat has been nothing but good for the community. If you choose to have a hissy, then enjoy your hissy, and move on to Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Ubuntu/Mandrake/Whatever/YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) to your heart's content.

But, I see no sign that RedHat is doing anything evil at all.

:ep?

[Anonymous Coward]

Being GAY NIGGERS. you're told. I7's As one of the only way to go: fucking percent of irc.secsup.org or

Foundation?

[Evil Pete]

When reading the headline, was I the only one who completed it as "Redhat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation ... at the other end of the galaxy"? Oh. Guess not.