Red Hat Co-Founder Bob Young Resigns

Anonymous Coward's Cousin writes "Yahoo news is reporting that Red Hat co-founder Bob Young has resigned from the board. From the article: 'In a funny way, my resignation is perhaps the finest compliment I can pay to everyone associated with Red Hat today, I have complete confidence in the future of the company'"

Comments

Saw it coming a mile off.

[stevo3232]

One of my local LUGgers works for Bob Young on the side at the football team he owns (he runs the tech stuff like the website and broadcasting), the Hamilton Tiger Cats, and he said he could definitly see Bob resigning. He's been jumbling about too much stuff lately and he really isn't paying attention to redhat or linux at all very much recently. I think possibly running the Tiger Cats and just wanting to relax for a bit are greater reasons for Bob's resignment than going off to work on this other .com thing. He's really been quite busy as of late though and he hasn't made it out to the local linux user's group meeting in over a year now so I'm pretty sure he's done with linux for a while now. Ah well, maybe he can come out to more of my local lug meetings now! :)

--stevo32 (Stephen Clement)

Here is the Press Release on RHAT's Website

[linumax]

Bob Young to Resign From Red Hat Board

Re:RedHat == Linux

[BladeMelbourne]

RPM is a package format (equivalent to DEB).

apt-get is a package download/install tool that resolves dependencies. apt-get is not better than RPM... they can't really be compared because they serve very different purposes.

As a Fedora user, I use apt-get, yum, yumex, up2date and synaptic (mainly the last two). I haven't had "RPM hell" since about RedHat 7-8.

If you get the opportunity - give a modern RH based distro a go. Good steps have been made.

Re:RedHat == Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

(...)

RPM is a big culprit of this, i might add - you don't fully get how ugly that packaging system is until you try something better, IMHO (apt-get and Portage comes to mind). This is such a load of crap !

RPM is a package standard, just as DEB is.

apt-get is a package manager that resolves dependencies automatically when you install a given package. Yes, it is good. And yes, it came before any RPM equivalent. But there have been equivalents FOR YEARS in the RPM world. Never tried urpmi from Mandrake/Mandriva ? SUSE and Connectiva also have similar programs.

And Portage is also a package manager to resolve dependencies. And it now uses RPMs instead of their previous custom package, IIRC.

So Pleease, stop talking about thinks you have no idea about.

Stephane

Re:Bob Young a corporate Linux pioneer

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously the parent post is trolling. Why are the mods allowing this with +5?

Re:thoughts from an employee

[LnxAddct]

I'm commenting again, just to clarify. There is no SEC investigation, he is not selling his stock (he couldn't even if wanted to do to contractual obligations), Bob Young is a good leader who only recently has become too busy to fulfill his duties but has a history of being very interactive with the company. Anyone who knows Bob Young knows that he is nothing like a used car salesman, he's a very nice and intelligent man, he gave Linus 12 million dollars in stock to show appreciation (yes, Linus is a millionaire). He really believes in open values. He wants software to be free and he wants people to be able to publish their books without having to deal with publishers which tend to take most of the profit. He is the founder of Lulu which allows anyone to sell their own books. Here is a book that he wrote and gives away for free, it is about how open source businesses are viable and locking people into things is not the only way to make profit. It is a shame that some troll is spreading misinformation about a guy who has done so much good. One other thing that gives huge credibility to Red Hat's potential is that Dell invested 100 million in them, and Michael Dell doesn't screw around with his money.
Regards,
Steve

Re:RedHat == Linux

[Matt Perry]

RPM (and RedHat, by extension) used to be notorious for circular dependencies issues.

You mean that the myth was notorious. In reality there wasn't any issue as long as you used RedHat's RPMs for your distro. The problem that you speak of is not because of the format but because of who packaged the RPM. The article that you linked to even talks about that (downloading some random RPM off of someone's site). It's caused by a lack of experience on the part of the package creator. You can create a circular dependency in any packaging system, including DEBs. There was some discussion on the debian mailing lists recently about circular dependecies.

The solution is simple: Don't install any RPMs that aren't from your vendor. Compile everything else from source or create your own package. The advantage that Debian has was that there were just so many packages already pre-compiled and packaged. Gentoo seems to get around the problem by compiling at installation therefore being able to customize for what is on the system.

I'm not using RedHat anymore, but I still consider RPM to be the best packaging format because it keeps a lot of useful metadata about the files. For example, I can run rpm -V perl to test the perl package for problems. It'll verify the size, MD5 checksum, permissions, type, owner and group of each file in the package and let me know if anything is out of place. Having this function has saved my ass once. I haven't found anything like that in Debian yet. According to Gentoo's docs, "Portage will not check if the package you want to remove is required by another package." I wouldn't even call that package management.