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.'"

Comments

Re:Red Hat...

[gowen]

To quote from the LWN thread:

Just some of the things that Red Hat spends a ton of money to create or enhance:
- gcc
- glibc
- SELinux
- udev
- Xen
- GNOME
- Many other parts of the kernel
- X.org
- Fedora Directory Server (bought for millions, open sourced, development continues)
- NetworkManager
- Dogtail
- Open Source Java (gcj and Classpath)
- Internationalization (Input Methods, Translation, Localization, etc.)

Goddamn Red Hat, and their secret plans to under mine Open Source by throwing money at it :)

Talk about a slanted summary

[youknowmewell]

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.

Re:Talk about a slanted summary

[Ryan Amos]

So true. RedHat is probably the best mix available of "hackable open source" mixed with "corporate oversight." There *has* to be a company with investors who have something to lose for most corporate boards to trust a piece of software. This means that the community loses control. There have to be viable support options that will be there 5 or 10 years from now and companies just don't get those assurances with community-based efforts.

It really is all about the support. RedHat is not that evil really, they contribute a lot of code to various open source projects. I think most peoples' beef with them is that they don't distribute a binary version of RHEL for free (source RPMs are of course available,) but you know what, the GPL says they don't have to. Get CentOS if you just want the OS, or get RedHat if you want the support. Or, if you just don't like RedHat as a distro, don't use it. Just don't expect a lot of proprietary stuff to support your distro (again with the support!)

Re:Giving up on Fedora?

[Nasarius]

It seems you didn't even finish reading the headline. Red Hat is giving up on the Fedora Foundation, which would have been "an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project."

Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market

[IANAAC]

... and for the servers that own redhat enterprise is going to be removed and loaded with umbuntu.

You must not know many people who actually work in corporate environments then. Most third party apps, such as Oracle, are only certified to run on RHEL or SUSE Enterprise. No other distrobution is certified. I can tell you first hand that if you're running Oracle on an unsupported platform, you will get ZERO support from them.

Really.

Try and sell that to your management.

Should they have thought of this before?

[bogie]

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.

Re:Giving up on Fedora?

[MSG]

No, it wouldn't. The Fedora Foundation would have been an entity that held patents created by Free Software companies, to defend Free Software against patent infringement suit. The foundation was no longer necessary after the founding of the "Open Invention Network".

This was clearly stated in the open letter, despite Ars' flawed description.

Bad summary, bad article

[MSG]

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.

Re:Par for the course...

[LnxAddct]

Umm... Red Hat is worth about 60% more than Novell so there is no chance of Novell buying them (but Red Hat buying them has been rumore once or twice). Red Hat also isn't screwing the community, read the damn email rather than the sensationalist headline. The original intention of the Fedora Foundation was to be a patent repository, giving unlimited access to any open source project, and using them defensivley against businesses if linux, or open source in general, was threatened. Red Hat, in the e-mail, said that they realized the Open Invention Network had already made significant head way with this, and that OIN would be "the 800-lb gorilla" in this area of open source. Rather than compete and divide resources with OIN, they decided that they'd rather join forces. That right there knocked out the main and initial reason for the foundation.

One of the other motivations behind the Fedora Foundation was for legal standing. Just like the FSF makes contributors sign over their rights so that there is one entity in control of all the copyrights, the Fedora Foundation was going to serve that purpose for Fedora. The problem being that the Fedora Documentation is released under a very liberal license, no sense on signing over there, the Core and Extra repositories are collections of projects coded by other entities (such as Red Hat, Novell, or individual contributors), so standing doesn't make sense there, and for specific Fedora projects like the Fedora Directory Server, Red Hat bought and open sourced all of that source code so Red Hat has the standing for the time being. There is no purpose for starting the Fedora Foundation to cover legal issues like "standing" because it is a non-issue for Fedora right now. Fedora has access to all of Red Hat's lawyers, but as a separate foundation, they'd need to fund their own lawyers and track many other expenses. Just because its non-profit doesn't mean those problems go away.

And this one was the real killer, a non-profit needs to have 33% of its revenue come from public donations (thats how you prove you're benfitting the public). Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Fedora, but here is an excerpt of things they'd have to track from the email:

* The cost of bandwidth for distributing Fedora to the world;

* Every hour that Red Hat engineers spend working on Fedora, whether that is the actual writing of code, release engineering, testing, etc.;

* Legal expenses of running a Foundation;

* Administrative expenses of running a Foundation.

As an intellectual exercise, let's ignore all of those numbers for now except for bandwidth. Back in the day, when Red Hat would release a distro, we would regularly get angry calls from network admins at big datacenters, complaining that we were eating all of their bandwidth. If you ever meet any of our IT guys over a beer, be sure to ask them about the time we melted a switch at UUNet.

The demand for Fedora is every bit as high, and the March 20 release of Fedora Core 5 was no exception. 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.

To sum it up, Red Hat wants to keep dumping more money into Fedora to make it even better, but if the Fedora Foundation was created then every dollar Red Hat put into Fedora would be another 30 cents that needs to be raised through charitable donations. Essentially, putting more money into t