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Red Hat Gives up on Fedora Foundation

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tip-of-the-hat dept.

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.'"

8 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Reading the letter by augustz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Fedora/RedHat is dead by dougmc · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm sorry but everything is Ubuntu nowadays.
    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.
    I know they have come out with newer stuff like yum
    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.
    It's no picnic with Ubuntu either but using Fedora is beyond absurdly slow.
    So, they picked a window manager by default that uses a lot of resources. So change it.
    except the barely functional (read: ugly) distros that use things like XFCE (gag).
    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.)

    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.

  3. Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed by jjohnson · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:Question for Red Hat guys by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, Dell distributes RedHat Enterprises Linux.

    What does that tell you? :)

    --
    WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
  5. Re:The reason is very simple by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    Fedora is not trying to be a desktop OS. If it was, flash, java and mp3 would ship out of the box.

    Fedora is trying to be... something. I'll have to say that it makes a great distro for a home server. And it's got a pretty wide range of software for the intrepid.

    My opinion is that Fedora is a workstation distro.

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  6. Re:Giving up on Fedora? by bout · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > It sounds to me like they see the value in Fedora
    > and don't want to give up control of it,... ;-)

    (Copying from a blog post I made about this)

    At first I was surprised that Red Hat finds it necessary to reserve ultimate control (veto power) over the Fedora project

    Veto power? The OpenSolaris Charter certainly does not grant Sun veto power. But then as I read the message more carefully and thought about it, something hit me like a bolt.

    First, some background: It's important to understand what exactly OpenSolaris is (and isn't). Unlike Fedora, OpenSolaris is purely a co-development project built around a code base. In other words, we do not conflate the OpenSolaris project/code with any of the distros derived from it. By contrast, Fedora is all three conflated into one: a) the Fedora co-development process b.) the Fedora code-base and c.) the Fedora distro.

    How does this relate to community self-governance?

    With OpenSolaris, one set of policies and procedures (the recently ratified OpenSolaris Charter) applies specifically to the co-development project and, by association, the code-base. This charter is community-driven. A separate set of policies and procedures applies to Solaris Express -- Sun's bi-weekly OpenSolaris based distro. This distro is Sun-driven and of course nobody objects to Sun controlling it because anyone can create their own OpenSolaris-based distro. (And as everybody knows, SchilliX, BeleniX, and Nexenta, have done exactly that.)

    Maybe RedHat should adopt this concept? It certainly stands to reason that the Fedora community developers would like it better...

    Eric Boutilier
    OpenSolaris
    Sun Microsystems

  7. Re:One more reason to support Kubuntu by Ganniterix · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have to points ..... one agrees with you... the other does not. As someone who works in the coprorate IT industry .... no corporation would dream of using hardware/software that is not supported (as in I pay you to give me a solution ASAP). If you are operating in a critcal environment.. you dont give a damn if **put your favourite hippie distro here** is totally open source or totally free. Be it Microsoft, HP, Sun, RedHat or Novell etc etc ... you pay you expect a result. It happens that RHEL in industry is the most widely supported name. On the other hand Linux was born out of a "personal" project and turned into a community project. This has led to Linux improvement. But even large "evil" corporations like RedHat give an immense contribution to the Linux community.

  8. Re:The reason is very simple by drooling-dog · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?

    No, but I've written a lot of closed code that is no longer useful to anybody because the companies that owned it folded. The point is that we don't have to rely on any one company - or any commercial company at all, for that matter - to keep the FOSS coming and improving. It's nice that some companies can build a business model around it, but I'm certainly not depending on that.