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Red Hat Gives up on Fedora Foundation
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writes up Red Hat's giving up on the Fedora Foundation: 'In an open letter distributed to the Fedora community earlier this week, Red Hat employee and Fedora project leader Max Spevack states that Red Hat is no longer interested in establishing an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project. Instead, Red Hat will revive the Fedora Project Board, which will include five Red Hat representatives, four members of the Fedora community, and a chairman appointed by Red Hat who will possess veto power.'"
When I first clicked on this it said "nothing for you to see here, please move along"... I felt a bit like one of the completely marginalised Fedora people now they have a lovely minority and no veto power
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
A lot of people support red hat on the principal that they are trying to get the world to adopt something which is open at its core... why are open source proponents turning a blind eye to how Red Hat's actions and nonconducive to the open source ideal?
FanFictionRecs.net
I have no doubt that there will be numerous unhappy people that Red Hat is going to keep a hardness on the Fedora project. Perhaps other community members will express interest in setting up the foundation: It's a good idea to have a open source project not intended to be incorporated into Red Hat not being governed by Red Hat.
Who knows, they could be the next M$!
Let the flaming commense.
It's probably a good idea. There is so much broken in Fedora Core 5 it's hard to see how they managed to ship it. To be fair some of the problems are due to Gnome's habit of taking 1/2 a step forward and 4 steps back with every new release.
I wouldn't say that they're necessarily giving up on Fedora. It sounds to me like they see the value in Fedora and don't want to give up control of it,... ;-)
I'd like to ask the linux community, is Red Hat still relevant?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
> How corporate involvement affects real open source projects
I dunno. PMD has certainly benefitted greatly from corporate involvement; the reason that the most recent release included support for checking JSP/JSF code was that a corporate-sponsored developer put together a nice JavaCC grammar and did all the integration work.
As the project lead, I'm happy that PMD has new functionality and a larger audience, not least of all because that may lead to more book sales! One can but hope, anyhow.
The Army reading list
Fedora will never be a fully functional production OS, for it's in the conflict with Red Hat's ability to sell its "enterprise" products.
For people who need a stable, secure, easy to maintain OS to run their production systems I would recommend Debian.
Suse is better anyways. :-)
Does anyone still have a link to the mock IRC chat from the different parts of RedHat and the mixed messages it was sending regarding the Fedora project? It would be nice if someone updated it. It seems to me that Fedora is just rebranded name for RawHide with some smoke and mirrors about accepting community involvement. I had tried to get involved for a while and decided that it was hard enough to just get a chance to chat with someone that had any power to really make changes. There was no hope that I would ever get to *be* part of the tight small "community" that really get to modify SPEC files.
What's going on here? With MS releasing Linux drivers for virtualization, Apple releasing code to run XP on Macs, and now Red Hat dropping the community they created it's like April fools all week!
My head hurts, time to go back to work and ignore all of this (right!)
fak3r.com
Name one.
They make money off of F/OSS! They're supposed to do everytyhing for free! They're just some corporation with their CEOs sitting in their offices being all corporaty and stuff!
166 mHz pentium? Please, step into at least 1999.
I've tried every FC since it came out. This (FC5) is the first one that ran worth a crap. Although I will admit uninstalling bluetooth support crashed the whole thing and i had to re-install - but that seems pretty typical of my linux experiences.
One thing that just can't happen in open source is to get so many diversified projects to run together nicely - it is not the nature of open source. Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
There are FAR better *nix based OSes out there that aren't nearly as troublesome as the redhate/fagora project. If you want uber simplicity, why not use FreeBSD? Need a webserver up and running in 20 minutes- how about OpenBSD?
Economics.
This is where the Free Software (Free as in no exchange of currency for the value you are getting) fails.
No commercial company can sustain that amount of development and give the product away. Period. Time will prove this correct. Either the companies will change their business models or they will die or be contained to a very small market and won't even come close to entering Microsoft's market.
I understand the whole idea behind the fedora project from RedHat's business perspective was to help adopt people to linux as well as grow its user base. The question you have to ask yourself is "how much" is that martketing costing the company? Obviously, too much.
And still, if you look at Fedora Core 5 as a desktop OS which is what its trying to be it's incomplete, buggy, is missing lots of default multimedia packages, the appplication are still way too fragmented. Sure there are lots of improvments, I'm running it right now, however if you compare it to XP, Microsoft as *nothing* to worry about in term of head to head competition. That's just the reality that must be recognized if you're going to improve and compete.
I think redhat ought to use fedora as its core product and develop that and charge for it. REL is just to slow in terms of advancments, in my opinion fedora is the better product, they just need to focus on refining it.
As it is, I would pay a flat $50-80.00 for fedora and think I'm getting a good deal. I don't believe that redhat's subscription model is very effective for desktop users.
Here is the link to the email Redhat sent out. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-li st/2006-April/msg00016.html
To say that the article writer has a bias against Redhat would be an understatement. Even when Redhat is transparent they are still lambasted. People want to hate Redhat, but without Redhat we would be much worse off in the Linux world. It's time people admit it.
It appears to make very good sense. Redhat supports a community distribution almost as well as many other players. I didn't like how little community involvement there was initially (especially without extras to start) but it's coming along, albeit a bit slowly.
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
Notice that I said "people" and not "all people". Many of my current peers have few good things to say about Redhat (some of them never did to begin with). I'm sure my admitedly anecdotal evidence is not unique in this regard. Redhat may be a good choice for the "suits" but many of us with autonomy in the trenches do not care for it and don't use it when we aren't required to.
Method of processing duck feet
When they dropped the desktop marked they already signed their death wish. Everybody I know is running umbuntu and for the servers that own redhat enterprise is going to be removed and loaded with umbuntu. It doesn't take long to despise RPM files after running APT.
Got Code?
One more reason why Kubuntu is Fedora/SUSE as the major community-led Linux distribution that aims to be easy to use.
IMHO, the problem is that RedHat wanted to see some significant outside sponsorship for Fedora, say from IBM, or perhaps Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu), but they didn't get it.
If they aren't getting the benefit of that sponsorship by giving up control, then why give up that control? It's useful to keep Fedora in sync with their commercial product.
Besides, don't kid yourself, if I need a piece of software, more likely than not, it's been tested on Fedora, if not already packaged and included, and it was probably originally written on or ported to Fedora, so that's what makes it a great distro. I've used them all, and I like Fedora Core 5, and it's not terribly broken as others have claimed. (although I've seen one bug in the login screen).
There's nothing wrong with this. For efficiency, we're going to see more code shared between distributions, and possibly testing, etc. However, it looks like RedHat's hopes of becoming the absolutely dominant distribution by embracing and extending Ubuntu (which is part of Debian), or by aligning itself with IBM, have been put on hold for now.
However, the major distributions are more like one another than they ever have been (compare SuSE and RedHat now with SuSE 6.0 and RedHat 7.0), and they will continue to share more and more code, but it looks like the market for Linux based OSes is large enough that there is enough room to that total consolidation will not happen.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I think that a lot of people assume that Red Hat Linux is this big ticket open source project, and therefore, Red Hat the company is bound to some subjective and abstruse ethical code. The GPL is not a manual of moral guidelines for running a business. Frankly a applaud Red Hat and all the other vendors of open source software that have implemented a successful business model around something that is free. For Linux to survive and grow, money has to come from somewhere. So when people in the know have to make the tough decisions, we shouldn't be so quick to criticize them for it.
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up. Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
the quality had gone down hill since fedora core 3 . the community of debian and all her off spring will fill the void . i think Linux needs to exist in different forms . They were getting overambitious with the project .
They use RHEL at work - I found a samba bug that had been patched in 3.0.21c we need patched on our servers. Management wouldn't let anything in that didn't come down from RHN.
Went to RHN and opened many many cases over the next month - trying to get one of the incompetent indian fucks to let engineering know that their 3.0.9 samba version they still have deployed now needed patched to fix this bug that was causing crashes on all of our rhel 3 servers.
It took a month - and multiple opened cases - before one of the indians assigned a ticket actually read what was in it and passed it to the engineering team to fix. All the other idiots just pasted cut and paste repsonses that had nothing to do with the problem I was pointing out - and handing them a patch for.
Finally - I got a patch samba version from them. Attached to the case. Still haven't seen it come down the subscribed update channels - so no one else is getting it.
Just because a faster computer can run it doesn't mean you should write slow-ass software.
That's the whole problem. Programmers are getting lazy because new machines are so fast but you add up all that slowness and it becomes a huge nasty-ass slow system.
I see no issue with Redhat doing this. If the Fedora guys are really unhappy about it, I think they should just take their ball and go home (figurativly). The beauty of Linux is the fork()
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Fedora Core the distribution, this is about the Fedora Foundation, a non-profit corporation Red Hat setup for various reasons. It proved unwieldy and not worth the hassle so they shut it down.
This does not affect Fedora Core, you and other Fedora Core users have not been abandoned.
bump
This is a good thing, for Redhat and what is good for Redhat is generally good for linux. Redhat pays many kernel developers and contributes huge amounts of opensource code- enterprise class opensource code.
Since Fedora Core is basically RHEL testing or unstable ( to try to fit the Debian nomenclature, I guess rawhide is unstable, FC is testing, RHEL is stable ), Redhat needs to be able to control where Fedora Core is going and what goes in. Partly to maintain quality control, partly to make sure Fedora goals incorporate the Redhat goals, partly for their legal department to not freak out.
Until another linux company becomes as central to linux in business as Redhat, what is good for Redhat is good for linux.
I think this will have limited impact for people who use Fedora Core as a home desktop (or even business). Probably none they will notice.
For those that use other distributions, this will have almost no impact, because the things they use in their distributions that Redhat contributes will still be high quality and GPL.
I installed FC5 on an old X600 Thinkpad, and it runs great for me, even running KDE. It installed clean and I've seen nothing broken in it yet.
What do you think is broken on it?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I hope you understand that CentOS is RHEL with the Red Hat (or "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" as they have to say) branding marks removed.
I thought this was quite funny. At least, it does not deserve a 0.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
If you're not good at getting the individual pieces to work by themselves, Linux is probably not a good thing to be using.
This is supposed to be the very role that distributors play, so you don't have to.
No, they can't make sure that every bit of software in the world works with their distribution, but the definition of a final release is that the bits included and supported in the release work and are supported.
KFG
We use Fedora extensively in my workplace, and I'm frankly glad that Red Hat is keeping the Fedora project under it's wing rather than spinning it off as a separate non-profit.
Having worked with several non-profits over the years, I can say from experience that a for-profit company will probably be more accountable and responsible, and better at "getting the job done".
We like being the "testing" arm of Red Hat. We get a free, open-source operating system, and Red Hat gets our bug fix submissions and feedback. It's a nice relationship. We also like that some of Red Hat's profits pay for developers to maintain different parts of our operating system. The end result is a very slick, easy to use, and easy to configure, multi-purpose operating system.
I am not so sure that a separate Fedora foundation would do as good a job as Red Hat is doing. Free software zealots will probably disagree, but guess what folks - it takes money and manpower to get things done. There's nothing wrong with a company making a healthy profit, and using some of that profit to give back to the community.
Geez, what is it with people today? Don't they teach reading comprehension in school any more?
Oh really? Seems to me that businesses love Redhat (and the clones like Whitebox) more for than everybody else put together. And Fedora Core is quite popular as well with the desktop user.
RedHat and similar companies (Mandrake or whateverthefuck it's called now, SUSE) have traditionally been the only large companies providing backing for Linux. Other companies like that support. This doesn't mean the distro is any good just because a business uses it.
Desktop users are all switching to Ubuntu. So while Fedora might be "quite popular" it ain't the cat's meow.
yum is very nice. Really, I never did understand why people hated rpm so much. Any sort of package management that also handles dependancies is going to add some complexity, and even then yum and the respositories makes it all pretty much automatic. I'm no rpm fanboy, but it does do it's job.
I didn't say yum's functionality sucked. I said it was slow as hell (ie. poorly written POS). I did say RPM sucked though and it does.
So, they picked a window manager by default that uses a lot of resources. So change it.
I didn't say anything about window managers. It's the distro specific stuff that sucks (boot time, package management).
Barely functional and ugly have nothing in common. And xfce seemed plenty functional to me, and plenty fast. (Of course, I'm still using fvwm as my window manager, the same window manager I used back when I had a 166 MHz box and probably even further back than that.)
Usability and look are often the same thing. Sorry if I wasn't clear but "ugly" to me means it has a bad feeling to it, it's hard to use or whatever. The functionality and look of FVWM or XFCE is crap. It works for sure, but it feels awful compared to a modern system (GNOME, KDE, Windows, OS X).
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up.
I didn't say "Windows XP screams" I said it screams compared to most Linux distros. Make sure you read what others write before responding.
Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
Where did I say it wouldn't work smartass? I said it was slow as hell.
First of all, I just wanted to say that considering what Red Hat has done for the community for over 10 years now I think people give them way too much shit. 99% of the comments knocking Red Hat are rants by idiots who have no idea how much Red Hat does. But in this case I have to ask what the hell they were thinking?
"Incorporating as a non-profit foundation creates immense accounting challenges, and a truly independent Fedora Foundation would be forced to track the cost of bandwidth for distributing Fedora and every single hour of Red Hat developer time used to improve Fedora as well as the legal and administrative expenses associated with perpetuating the project and running the Foundation."
They are just realizing this now?
"In order to maintain non-profit status, a third of the Fedora Foundation's money would have to come directly from public sources. At present, Spevack argues, this just isn't feasible."
They are just realizing this now?
"Giving up" control of Fedora and then taking it back for the reasons listed just smacks of poor planning. Many people have argued "why should I help out Fedora why Red Hat just "takes" those changes and sells them in RHEL". I've always thought that was a retarded baseless argument. But on the other hand plenty of people seem to make that complaint. I don't think Red Hat is going to make many friends in the community by pulling Fedora even closer. I hope they are prepared to deal with the fallout and possible defection of contributors.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
166 mHz pentium? Please, step into at least 1999.
:)
Desktops and servers are a small part of the world, numerically they are dwarfed by embedded and other small scale devices. Now you may not find an old pentium in many of these devices but you will find some, and probably more that Sparc, Alpha, and other "mainstream" server CPUs that receive Linux support. I did a quick google of single board computers and I was finding 386 based solutions. I'm having flashbacks to an embedded kernel development job in 1988.
Wow. I've had some problems with linux as well, but never had to reinstall.
Sounds like your'e trolling, though. I mean, the problem you describe is related to the kernel only. How can that say anything about FLOSS' ability to coopoerate and "run together nicely"?
Examples of open source "running nice togehter" include jack with applications like Hydrogen and Ardour, or media codecs like OGG and FLAC with media players (like XMMS).
In areas where a defined protocol or standard exists, open source excels. I mean, look at projects like Apache, Mozilla-projects, Jabber, libxml and many more.
Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together and thoroughly tested as a whole. Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
;p
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like you should stop using a Red Hat-based distribution and switch to a Debian-based distribution. Debian takes on the accountability for thorough testing and package integration, and they have years worth of experience with open betas.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
So, they picked a window manager by default that uses a lot of resources. So change it.
test your window manager vs debian or ubuntu using the same window manager... Fedora/Red Hat are dog slow! Must be all the glue they add to their packages...
It seems like companies tend to forget their roots. They have some marginal success and start making money and then get scared and seem to adopt the "comfortable" business practices of large corporations... Somebody said that RedHat could become the next Microsoft and I don't think that's a far off analysis.
One of the tools Microsoft, if anyone remembers the old days, used to achieve market dominance was *giving* away sdk's and working with developers, unlike the Apple development products of the time that were very costly. The Microsoft exploded and then began closing the doors. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 day having a great deal of control over my system, it wasn't until 95 that that openess really began changing.
I remember when Amazon went through patenting issues the open community surrounded Amazon and tried to help them stay open. The sucess of that effort, I am sure will encourage debate, but that is not my point... If we as a community abandon a company or project everytime the controllers of that project make a mistake then the Open Source community will constantly suffer.
With everyone reinventing the wheel everytime a project doesn't do exactly what they think is best, we find ourselves with standards and specs that don't apply, tons of vaporware and a bunch of individuals clamoring for recognition and attacking all competing projects...
Isn't the point of the Open Source community to *be* a community? Is there something we can to to help RedHat remember who they are? Or are we doomed to attack everything that we once loved and supported?
I don't know if RedHat can be salvaged, I don't know if RedHat should be salvaged... I just remember a day not to long ago that RedHat was a beacon and something to believe in... I remember a day even futher back where it was Microsoft and even further back Apple.
How does a company stay open and honest if not through the support of it's community?
jeeeezzzz!!!! Read the announcement again....They are NOT abandoning Fedora, they are not going with the Fedora Foundation...THE OS IS GOOD TO GO, IT WILL STILL BE THERE. Farging trolls!! :o|
We just hate corporations, not RedHat in particular, until of course we go to work for some startup and get granted some valuable stock options. Then we loooove corporations, at least until our options vest and we can start flaming corporations again.
What are you, a man or a mouse? It's Redhat's trademark, they can do whatever the hell thay want. It's a free country, get off your ass and start your own distro, eveybody else has.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
What? Running XP on Fedora? Really? When?
Corporates always take decisions keeping an eye on profits. They don't have the luxury to take decisions with philosopies in mind. That is because they are to a certain extent answerable to their share holders.
This is where a project like Debian gains significance. Since it is not funded or controlled by any corporation, it lives up to the philosophy guiding it and will not be swayed by market dynamics.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
Yeah - I probably didn't HAVE to reinstall - I just chose to. Removing bluettooth somehow killed gnome - when I started X I got the very very basic window manager. I could have messed around trying to figure it out, or simply reinstall, leaving bluettooth and some other stuff out.
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems. That is the kind of problems I'm talking about. There is no one who insures that when you install product A it will work. You have to do the work yourself. I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box. MS used to go to the local EggHead and buy 1 copy of every single program during testing prior to release. I'm sure they don't still do that, but I am sure they do something like that. There is no single entity in OSS that can take on that responsibility, time or financially.
It doesn't reduce the value of OSS, but it is a very real difference that must be understood.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Suits: 1
Dirty Hippies: 0
Red Hat has done it again. The fact is, this is TWICE they have said "piss-off" to the Open Source community. They need to make money, and Fedora brings them ZERO revenue. Frankly, until someone buys Red Hat (as Novell did SuSE) that has some real cash behind them, I wouldn't look for anything free from Red Hat. It just isn't good economics, and all the Fedora users in the world are not going to keep the lights on...only paying customers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
It's all about target audience. Red Hat Enterpise Linux is all about being a stable production OS. Fedora Core is all about being on the bleeding edge of Linux technology.
Stability comes at the cost of lots of testing and debugging time. That's why a production-class OS like Debian or RHEL is always a bit behind in the software it includes.
If you like having the latest and greatest, and are willing to accept the risks that go along with that (there's a reason "cutting edge" became "bleeding edge," after all), Fedora is a good choice. If you want a production OS, you shouldn't even consider it. You should instead go with RHEL, one of the free rebuilds like CentOS, Debian, etc.
your not getting FP unless you pay to see the articles early...and these article are hardly worth seeing for free....
Gentoo? Gentoo would be a nightmare in a large corporate setting.
... ...
Me: I recommend we use gentoo as our linux solution.
Boss: What will this give us over other distros.
Me: We will have systems that are highly optimized for our environment.
Boss: What are the drawbacks?
Me: We have to compile everything by hand, which will require more rollout time and resources.
Boss:
Me: We will also be forced to upgrade to the latest bleeding-edge versions everytime the gentoo folk release a new version because the emerge defs get changed and are rarely compatible with the previous version.
Boss:
Me: This means I will have to devote 90% of my time maintaining our gentoo install so we will have to hire another admin to handle all the other tasks.
Boss: Find a new job.
I love gentoo, I use it at home, but it definately has a much higher maintenance cost. I would not even think of using it in a corporate environment.
Um, CENTOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat won't release binary RHEL ISO's for free, but because of the GPL they have to provide source. So they do. Then CENTOS scrapes off the "Red Hat" logo, recompiles that source, and ships it as CENTOS.
You're still using Red Hat.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
2. CentOS works just like Red Hat because it's literally a clone of Red Hat. They take the open source RPMS from RHEL, remove or replace anything trademarked or non-redistributable, point updates to their own servers and rebuild. The result is a Linux distro with the same structure, library versions and software set as RHEL.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
So let me get this straight:
They were going to spin off Fedora and let it grow based on its technical merits, and actually come out with *gasp* stable versions like the OpenSuSE project and attract more developers. . . and now they want to kill off any progress they might have made?
Typical Redhat thinking. This reminds me of their being the dominant desktop distribution and then they cut the cord on the desktop product.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
As much as I've been disappointed with Fedora (it panics on i915 and i945 chipsets. Other distributions don't) I liked that RedHat was going to spin it off into an independent foundation and it was going to become a more stable distribution. Why? Because variety is good, and competition is important, even in, er, nay, ESPECIALLY in the open source "market"
I've disliked RedHat ever since they killed off the desktop distribution, but I'm sad to see their greed destroy what Fedora might have become, before it really had any chance to move forward.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The Fedora Foundation was never meant to be "an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project". It was meant to be an independent patent holding entity which would defend Free Software from patent infringement suits. The article has it all wrong, even though it's very clearly stated in the open letter to which they link.
There's a lot of that going around. It seems people get through "Fedora" and assume they know what the next word is going to be.
People who don't read the article? Standard for Slashdot.
People who don't read the summary? Rare, but I can see it happening.
But people who don't read the headline? That seems silly, even for this place.
Indeed. Even the trolls can't keep track of what they said.
I didn't say the `distro was any good'. I was countering the poorly thought out `I'm sorry but everything is Ubuntu nowadays' claim you made.
Sorry, but NOT everything is Ubuntu nowadays. Sure, it might be growing rapidly, and might be the most popular distribution now, but NOT everything is Ubuntu.
They are not ALL switching to Ubuntu. Many, maybe, but not ALL. Don't they teach simple logic in school nowadays?
You must do different things with your systems than I do on mine. I boot rarely enough that I don't really care how long it takes (and I just checked my other `fast' computer ... 35 seconds, from the moment that grub started loading the kernel to the time that the gdm login screen appeared. Just how fast do you want it to be? Perhaps Ubuntu can do that in 25 seconds (warning: made up number) but if so ... who cares?) and I only average a few minutes on `package management' per week. A much bigger issue is how quickly my applications come up and run, and (a much smaller issue) how quickly I can get a given application installed if I need it (package management, but yum makes that very quick and easy), and I'm very happy with that.
Yes, apparantly your version of `ugly' is very different from that of the rest of the world. I've found fvwm to be perfectly functional, and xfce was as well when I tried it. I've looked at the default window manager that Fedora Core gives you, and it's very `pretty' (read: eye candy, opposite of `ugly' for most people) and seemed functional enough to me, but I didn't really care for it. Same for KDE, though it's less `pretty'.
The functionality of fvwm is just fine, thank you. (It does lack eye candy, however -- I won't deny that.) Of course, it's not installed with Fedora Core -- I had to compile it myself -- so it's probably not a good thing to whine about when talking about FC.
And perhaps I wasn't clear enough -- I've found that 1) Windows XP is plenty fast, even on the slow hardware of that laptop, and 2) Fedora Core was similarly fast. Boot time is a bigger issue on the laptop, as it's booted up more often, but even so, it's fast enough. And even looking at boot times, starting from when grub loads the kernel, up to the gdm login screen is 73 seconds. For XP, it's 40 seconds -- so yes, Windows boots faster. But I don't care much about how fast the system boots -- I care about how usable it is, and both FC and XP are plenty usable. (Note that XP does a lot more stuff after the login screen appears -- there's a minute or two after you've logged in where the system is dog slow because it's doing ... something ... and pounding on the disk. So they've just delayed some of the bootup activities, which seems a good trade-off to me for a desktop system.)
`Works fine' implies some amount of performance. Even if every function works properly, if it takes 8x as long as one would expect it t
Other niggles: There is no support for the Pentium 2, 3 or 4 architectures. RPM is configured to reject anything with an arch above i686, you have to instruct it to specifically ignore architectures for RPMs. It's simply a case of modifying the arch compatiblity test, but they haven't done that.
(I know, most of the code won't change, but it would be nice if they made the effort to compile to architectures people use in practice. Since they've already got an "unsupported" unit, it would also be possible for them to rig up cross-compilers to most of the standard architectures and make an "experimental" distro for a bunch of platforms. Linuxfromscratch is good, but tedious.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
That Fedora would die. My bad, back to dependency hell :) And to think that Oracle, cherished partner, only needs 20 steps to get that god awful java installer going... Well, you can't blame me for hoping.
And about the article, pfft, I'm on slashdot, I don't RTFA :D
.... Netcraft confirms Fedora is dying
Name some things that are broken in FC5. I have it installed on my main desktop and laptop and have been using it since before it was released. Everything has been working perfectly.
For the sake of completeness, here is a link to the *full text* of the email that was sent to the fedora-lists with the Foundation announcement.
A pril/msg01022.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-
I'm not sure I agree with you there.
I think Windows became the standard home OS because it was the standard business OS, and it became that because of the partnership between IBM and MS. A lot of people who had the money to buy PCs when they were new (and far more expensive than they are now, relatively) went out and bought Compaq clones of the machines they were familiar with at the office.
If what you say is true, than the Apple II would have become the enterprise standard microcomputer, because it was practically the standard-issue home computer in the early 80s. But companies bought IBM, MS-DOS based PCs by the bushel-basket, and once the clones came out this had a trickle-down effect to the home market that pushed out Apple. (There was also the issue of pricing.)
I think you'd have to rewrite a lot of history if your hypothesis of the home market driving the enterprise one was correct. I think it's generally almost always the other way around, although I suppose you could argue that this might change in the future.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Slashdot: New for nerds, stuff that matters.
Sometimes I wonder how low the standards for nerdom has gone. Most top-level comments here are the same old "I don't like Fedora (I like so-and-so)" comments disguised to sound like there was a lot of wisdom in it. Heck, some don't even go to the trouble of making their comments look smart. Many of the RedHat/Fedora detractors either a) don't reference the actual article, or b) spout utter nonsense not even backed by passable facts (or both).
For goodness sake, could the nerds be smarter and make comments that are more constructive. Where's the intelligence? People just sound like whiners.
I spent a year on FC3 banging it hard with development, new code builds, rebuilds, competing code bases, competing Yum repos, dependency Hell chewing gum fixes, and still managed to do all sorts of email, doc writing, newsgroup browsing, video watching and transcoding, audio file listening and cleanup, everything you'd do on the net with Windows. Even got my USB webcam working on it easy. Never broke it totally. Managed to fark it when I used the partition utility from System Commander to move and resize the ext3 partition. Then parted and fsck couldn't do jack with it. Hardly Fedora's problem. Had I used parted to begin with, it probably would have worked fine.
FC5 was a pain to install, refusing to do a graphical install no matter what command I used to force it, and booted to run level 3 and made me edit inittab to get it to boot the gui.
Ubuntu was quick enough, but I'm not a fan of Debian anything, so I keep that in a VMWare sandbox on a Windows workstation.
I'll go with Fedora for personal messing around. Red Hat for production.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
1. Red Hat is not abandoning Fedora Core. They had plans to create a nonprofit foundation to run Fedora, but those plans didn't work out.
RTFA. The Fedora Foundation was supposed to be a NPO to "own" patents developed for the technologies that Fedora/Linux/RedHat was wanting to keep "open" for the community. It has NOTHING to do with the OS project itself. Your Fedora Core is perfectly safe and not even affected by this.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on CentOS' website anymore is that RH's lawyers called them up and insisted they remove the trademarks. So now whenever Red Hat is mentioned on the website, they refer to it as "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."
Understandable.
"RedHat Support, how may I help you?" "Yeah, I'm running CentOS..." "Wait, that is not our product." "What? Don't #%@!$%@ me, buddy, it says so right on their site!!!!" "Well, it's not us, we can't guarantee it, and we certainly aren't going to spend time and money supporting something that isn't tested by our QA teams."
Makes sense to me. Call me crazy.
I always wondered about this. When I do a "yum -y update" does that mean I probably will have a broken system after a fresh distro install?
Simple QA at best is all you can hope for, not a year of open beta.
No, you surely can't
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I don't want to start a flame war, but that isn't something I worry about with MS. Not that there isn't an occasional problem, but significantly less of a chance for problems than in OSS. And that is because a huge amount of time and money is spent insuring every product runs out of the box.
I can only imagine 3 possibilities:
* You live in a fairy land I have no access to
* You have no experience with MS software
* You are a paid MS astroturfer
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The reason for the installation is OpenNMS. It is an XML/Java based app. It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems.
On their website, OpenNMS offers downloads for the following OSes:
CentOS 3, 4: rpm
Debian Woody, Sarge, Sid: deb
Fedora Core 1-10: rpm
Mandrake 8, 9.2, 10: rpm
RedHat 7-9, RHEL 3, 4: rpm
Solaris 8, 9, 10: gz
SuSE 8, 9, 10: rpm
Plus source in tar.gz
I find that actually pretty impressive. If the packages they create for the distros don't work, contact OpenNMS. Their software is GPL, so there should be no problem creating working packages distributable by the distros themselves if they choose. (Ubuntu Dapper at least has none)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
When I do a "yum -y update" does that mean I probably will have a broken system after a fresh distro install?
"Yum has a nice man page that explains the other options. Unfortunately on the nw-9 base image we forgot to include the "man" program for displaying man pages.
There's no accounting for this sort of incompetence.
KFG
You're not forced to upgrade to bleeding edge at all.
I think you're not a very competent gentoo admin... actually.
A nit, if I may. Fedora is not "RHEL testing" at all. Fedora (Core and especially Fedora Extras) is an open development project with everything and the kitchen sink. Some of the improvements and other interesting bits are lifted from Fedora and ported into the next RHEL, but Fedora stands on its own as a distro.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
Just one in Evolution ...
...
Installed with LinuxCOE so all current updates were updated right from the beginning
I'm not sure what your point is? You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind. Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"? None? then troll someone else asshole.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
$YOUR_DISTRO sucks and no one should use it. $MY_DISTRO is much superior in every regard.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
You may nit away but RHEL 3 was essentially RH 9. RHEL 4 is essentially Fedora Core 3. RHEL 5 will likely essentially be FC 6 or so... The base software is the same. Bug fixes, support, ISV certification etc. are the value of RHEL.
The Debian nomenclature doesn't quite work as I originally indicated, but it is pretty close.
FC is closer to a test for RHEL than some people like to consider. A very polished, useable, great test.
Consider the following from the fedoraproject.org website:
"Why should I pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when Fedora Core is free? What is the relationship between Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Both Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are open source. Fedora Core is a community project and serves as the base platform on which RHEL is built. The cost of RHEL comes from the subscription, which provides assorted certifications and support for additional architectures, as well as 7 years of enterprise support. Red Hat also enhances its RHEL offerings with additional software and with certification programs. Despite the misinformation that others spread, the base RHEL distribution is open source, and the complete source code can always be downloaded from [WWW] Red Hat's FTP servers. "
At install time, the documentation says you can install XFS and reiserfs by: boot: linux xfs boot: linux reiserfs reiserfs isn't compatible with selinux
Does that mean that mono will be available in fc6?
flamebait++
fedora = red hat enterprise beta ..don't do their beta testing for them for free!!!!
Of course, for those who bothered to read RedHat's open letter, they will know that Fedora will continue to live on, "business as usual" as far as the average user is concerned. All that's changed is the organisational/support structure that RedHat has been providing which deals with open source and which serves as a central point for all those open source patents. It hasn't worked, so they're going for a simpler approach.
Yes, I'm oversimplifying, and generalising, so sue me for having a contrary view. Too many people seem to be doing just the opposite... </rant>
As for RedHat trying to do anything evil... would anybody who reckons they are like to try to guess how many patches they've contributed just to the Linux kernel tree as a result of bug reports for their enterprise products, say in the last year? Anyone?
RHEL does not compete against freely distributed software, otherwise CentOS and others would have killed it off already
RHEL competes with other vendor supported *nix's and windows server editions.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
One thing that's really cool about Linux is that if you don't like one particular distribution, there are a dozen or so competing distributions that you can use instead. Now I personally like Fedora and RedHat. I've comfortable with the tools and quality of the distribution. Yet someone I know, who's a Linux guru, prefers Ubuntu. Another one prefers Gentoo. And there are arguments for Slack or SuSe, Mandriva, Debian, DSL, and what have you. If you don't like it, move on to another distribution. It's really that simple. If this business model doesn't work for Fedora/RedHat, then so be it.
And you know what? I'm really sick of people who don't contribute anything but hot air jawing on about how offended they are about this change. Whatever the distro, they are some damn fine programs available for Linux that don't cost a cent except for maybe a CD or some bandwidth charges. Having to purchase software for my small business only makes me appreciate the hard work of the community -- RedHat and Fedora included -- much more.
> ...their package manager (too much dependency hell)....
You are either basing that on five year old experiences (which were horrible, I was there too) or not using the right tool for the job. These days only real propeller spinners need to manually invoke rpm. Up2Date and Yum take all the dependecy hell out of package manangement. Using rpm manually in this day would make about as much sense as a Debian user using dpkg manually instead of apt-get.
And no, apt-get isn't the answer despite people continuing to attempt to hammer it into RH based distros. As long as you stick to i386 it sorta works but it doesn't deal with bi-arch at all so if you load up an x86_64 machine you will soon have to abandon apt. Yum and Up2Date work though.
Democrat delenda est
Personally, I think Redhat should scrap RPM, adopt DEB as a package format, and position themselves as a support agent for Debian or their own flavour (ie, validated stable packages for enterprise, or whatever) of it.
Why waste time/money on developing Fedora that could better spent on fixing bugs in / consolidating Debian?
My 2c anyway... I used redhat 4-1 - 6.2 previously before testing out Core 4, Debian / Slackware / FreeBSD between them...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I think it is closer to Rawhide -> experimental, FC -> unstable, RHEL -> testing, to be honest.
Wow, they did it again - it's history all over again.. free software from RedHat suddenly switches to a fee-based product once it gains ground and popularity.. And us non the wiser :)
RedHat launched Fedora at the same time it killed the idea of internally developing a desktop-ready Linux distro. Fedora - sponsored by the community - was meant to rise up and take control of the desktop, leaving RedHat to concentrate on the more lucrative enterprise / server market.
Unfortunately, Fedora hasn't got a tenth the marketshare of the Debian-inspired upstart, Ubuntu.
RedHat's decision to take more direct control of the Fedora project is a tacit acknowledgement that its strategy of ignoring the desktop in an effort to succeed there has failed. It is apparent that RedHat now knows that in order to win the desktop, you actually have to concentrate on it, nurture it, and grow it as if you mean it.
I think it is important to realize that the email states that one of the primary reasons for switching away from the foundation and back to a project is that the foundation would eventually limit how many resources (money, bandwidth, etc.) Redhat could contribute to Fedora. This is a problem, because Redhat does not want to cut back on Fedora, but rather increase contributions.
> Here's another funny thing: if you choose to incorporate as a non-profit entity in the United States, then you subject yourself to a number of rigorous IRS tax tests. One of these tests is the "public support test." If you say you're a public charity, well by golly, you have to prove it. If, within four years, you aren't collecting fully one third of your money from public sources, then you're not actually a public charity.
[snip]
> As an intellectual exercise, let's ignore all of those numbers for now except for bandwidth.
[snip]
> So let's take a conservative guess and say that the bandwidth cost for distributing Fedora comes to $1.5 million a year. Yes, even though we have BitTorrent trackers and Fedora mirror sites worldwide.
>
> That means that a public Fedora Foundation would have to raise $750k in public funds -- remember the one-third public support test -- every single year, just to pay for *bandwidth*, assuming no growth and no other expenses.
>
> So what would happen, under such a scenario, if Red Hat were to decide to spend more money on Fedora? Because that's exactly what Red Hat wants to do.
You call me a liar, but then confirm what I said - the need to make the stuff work yourself. Make up your mind. Which one did you download and install and it "just worked"
:)
You said in the GP: 'It takes days just to track down compatible versions of RPMs to make it work. Then you have to deal with the "no two linuxes are alike as far as where the files are" problems'
You don't express yourself very clearly here, but you can only mean that it is hard to find an installer package of OpenNMS itself, or that it's hard to find its dependencies. Finding the package itself obviously is not hard, since they are all on the site. Finding the dependencies should be either a no brainer or simple for the supported distributions if the OpenNMS packages work.
I have no idea if the packages work, but there is no reason why they shouldn't. That's why I said that if they don't, you should inform the OpenNMS guys. "There is no one that ensures that stuff works" is simply not true, as others have pointed out in this thread: the distros do that. OpenNMS should work with them.
As for trolling, I don't. It's just that you wrote so many false things in this one post that I kinda flew off the handle. If I look at the thread, I'm not the only one. Oh, well, you're my freak no anyway
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
eh? Most RPMs in FC and RHEL packages are supplied as .i386.rpms, which are optimized for pentium4, but using only i386 instructions. This is because due to the pentium4 architecture's long pipelines, non-optimal instruction ordering hurts performance a lot. For the architectures in between, it's less critical, and running pentium4-optimized binaries on a Pentium 2 is no usually terribly harmful. For exceptional components (the kernel, glibc, openssl libraries), i686.rpms are supplied as well as the i386.rpms. These are also pentium4-optmized, but use the entire i686 instruction set (including CMOV, which, as an aside is why these won't work on some other non-Intel i686 architectures).
Unless you've done extensive profiling, I doubt you have any solid evidence to indicate that rebuilding other chunks of the OS in ways different to the above will result in significant performance gains. If you have, present your evidence to the distro vendors and the community, and I'm sure they'll listen, willingly or not. :-)
It seems to me Debian is the only big community driven distro left on the field (Gentoo has a big audience but, somehow, I feel the requisite to recompile everything from source limit its adoption)
I hope the debian benefits from the contribute of those that do not want to support RadHat enterprise (a debian based scientific distro, to superseed the rh7.3 based we have now (SL) would be great).
I have been using the stable release for a long time. When I felt packages were becoming too old I swtched to debian unstable and lo! the only distro more up-to-date (that I can think of) is gentoo but my packages are already compiled; updating a program is just a command away (apt-get, of course), and I did not experience any critical bug that apt-listbugs did not warn me before the installation.
I work daily in a mixed windows/unix environment and I have never had an issue mounting samba filesystems or operating with printers (but maybe you need something more complex).
Are you really talking of _your_ experience or just because you have heard "debian is oooold". Give debian a fair chance, it's not manna from heaven but it's worth a try.
Fedora is fully functional and it can be used for production. It gets updates like any other distro you fool! Have you ever heard about fedoralegacy for example?
Why am I pissed? Because your post got "Insightfull". It was nothing else than a troll.
I hate you Debian fanatics out there. You don't have technical reasons but still you continue to endorce Debian like it's something totally different than the rest. In reality it really isn't anything else than a yet another linux distro. Certainly, it is not the most advanced one (like you seem to think - falsely).
Why is it always Debian (or Ubuntu) which gets the recommendations... Because you are the distro war starters.
The most major one (with no fix that I'm aware of) is that starting a new GUI program from a terminal window doesn't give focus to the new program. This makes things like xmame -fullscreen impossible to use.
The installation problems that I ran into include the fact that Privoxy doesn't update properly between FC4 and FC5 (it crashes on start until you uninstall Privoxy and reinstall it from scratch), and Squid loses its configuration until you rename squid.conf.rpmnew back to squid.conf. Not large problems, but a bit of a head-scratcher until I figured out what was happening.
Having said that, with the exception of the focus problem listed here I have solved everything else and am most happy with FC5 on this computer.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
"switch to a Debian-based distribution. Debian takes on the accountability for thorough testing and package integration"
And what makes you believe that such "thorough testing and package integration" will be found on other "Debian-based distributions", not being Debian itself?
This is true, but not exactly "user friendly". "User friendly" means having the options in the menu, since all the code has to be present for the options to be usable in the first place. It also means they're still missing many of the other filing systems Linux supports.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, ok but you literally said "You cannot install .." meaning it's
not possible. That's a long way from just not being user friendly.
The most major one (with no fix that I'm aware of) is that starting a new GUI program from a terminal window doesn't give focus to the new program. This makes things like xmame -fullscreen impossible to use.
This is due to Metacity's (the window manager) "experimental strict-focus-approximation feature" recently introduced upstream:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326159
There is a modified Metacity RPM package available for FC5 which has a patch to configure the window focussing behaviour:
http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/metacity/fc5.html