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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. "
seems like a dupe: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 1712208&tid=110&tid=106
News for the amnesiac. Stuff that mattered.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.