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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.''
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,... ;-)
why are open source proponents turning a blind eye to how Red Hat's actions and nonconducive to the open source ideal?
Name one.
Seriously and with no hand-waving, name one action where Red Hat's actions were "nonconducive to the open source ideal." Back it up with WHY it is what you claim it is. You are going to have a tough time.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0, Enterprise Server 2.x, and Fedora 4. I was mostly happy with them, and was willing to give them a chance after they split off Fedora from mainline Redhat. I then switched jobs to a FreeBSD shop, and I've been a convert ever since, from my workstation at the office to my home machines. The base system is a high performer and stable, and the ports tree is well maintained and much better than RPMs ever were.
After recently trying Fedora Core 5 and Gentoo due to the need to run the new free VMWare server product, I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I can't say that Redhat has necessarily "sold out" but they're not the company I cheer for anymore. Granted, they *are* pushing good technologies, like Xen, but aside from the fringe benefits of their clout, I don't like them much these days.
Method of processing duck feet
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
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
And I really hope he/she meant "harness" instead of "hardness".
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!
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.
I'm willing to bet, were there a way to accurately gauge, we'd find that RH and it's derivites have the largest install base of all the distros.
So yes, they are relevant. Software is written with RH in mind. It might work on other systems, but the target system is RH.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
One more reason why Kubuntu is Fedora/SUSE as the major community-led Linux distribution that aims to be easy to use.
neither, you just posted...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
More than ever.
RedHat is making enterprise quality Linux distribution, i.e. carefully designed, thoroughly tested, and planed support for 5+ years.
Running Linux just for the sake of running Linux is not cool any more. People use Linux to actually get something done. Linux-based projects nowdays spawn for well over 5 years, and they require a solid OS provider.
Fedora is really just a playground. RHEL or CentOS builds of RHEL are a lot more interesting.
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, like you; switched from Redhat to FreeBSD, however I don't think I agree with them going "beyond bloated and sucky". Lets face it, Redhat has been doing whatever they want to for YEARS, doing stuff like sticking config files in bizarre locations. The bloat and suck you describe are more attributed to the packages installed being bloated than the hand of Redhat itself (gtk1 vs gtk2 for instance).
One vendor for a software system I work at stick to Redhat/fedora. Why they never went with debian I'll never know. So I installed fedora core 4 with no gui and it's pretty much the same as it ever was. Config files and stuff moved and many things are done differently (surprize surprize) but overall it's nothing drastic.
But yeah, once you get your hand in the FreeBSD ports collection you tend to cringe thinking about the RPM hell of yester-year. It really has gotten better...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Um-buntu - Linux for hesitant people
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
They also distribute Novell/SuSE your point?
Wow, please recommend Oracle on CentOS to your employer and then call Oracle when you have a problem and see how fast you get fired. If you are having bloat problems with a RedHat server, then it's your administrative skill set that requires some bloating. I have lots of RHEL and Fedora servers and I don't have any bloat problems. Our RHEL-64 Oracle cluster WOW'ed me once it was up and running after we converted from Solaris SPARC to RHEL-32 (money savings wow) and now RHEL64 on the same hardware. (sheer performance wow)
As for Gentoo. I'm actually a Gentoo fan and we have Gentoo boxes. Though they where here before I got here and there won't be any more installed as servers. In our environment time is very important and emerge can be a major time sponge! I just don't find Gentoo's emerge pratical in a large server environment. We can do huge image backups of every server we have, so when a major failure happens, we have to rebuild then restore the data. Emerge takes way to much time while services are down.
Seriously. Ubuntu is pretty much a support-it-yourself distribution. Not only is there virtually no (at least that I've seen) enterprise software that's certified to run on it, but you can't purchase as a product with support like you can with RedHat or Suse. I suppose you can get support options from Canonical separately, but I think that's going to be a tough sell to management, since they don't seem to be bundled very well. It's just not a very "corporate friendly" distro.
... well, I can just imagine some of my bosses staring at "Linux for human beings" and wondering what the hell that's supposed to mean.
RedHat, on the other hand, has two different server products, each of which are spelled out for the types of workloads they're designed for. They have a "top of the line" one that they tout is good for CRM/datacenter/ERP/database stuff, and a cheaper one that aims for mail/file/print/web servers. Each one has three different levels of support. You could easily argue that the variations in product lineup (ES versus AS) is mostly marketingspeak, and I might agree with you, but it's the kind of marketingspeak that sells.
If you're looking for a distro to set up as your new print server, RedHat has matrices that basically tell you exactly what to get. If you go to Ubuntu's site
I'm not trying to bash Ubuntu here, it's a good distro (I run Kubuntu on my Linux machine at home), but I think comparing it to RHEL as the GP is doing, is just trying to force it into a market that its not aimed at.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually, it's interesting but IBM just certified DB2 UDB to run on Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/db2cert
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
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.
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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.
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-
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
The last time I went through rpm hell was in the days of Redhat 7 or 8. apt-4-rpm and yum have completely eliminated rpm hell for years now.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
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:
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
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.
$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)
> ...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
You forgot some of the most important ones, namely they coded and maintain the entire 2.6 linux CPU Scheduler and the 2.6 Virtual Memory Manager. Yes, you can contribute a large part of 2.6's great performance to Red Hat. They also wanted an open source Java implementation so they started GCJ to compile java code natively. Open Source runs all the down from the top to bottom at Red Hat, even one of their VP's is the guy who originally coded the GNU C++ compiler. Here are two non-complete lists of other projects Red Hat either entirely codes and maintains, or contributes large portions of code to, keep in mind that they don't list everything: Sourceware Projects and Red Hat Contributions. This move by Red Hat has been given a bad spin by those reporting it, the Fedora Foundation's expenses and other requirements would have killed off Fedora, if anyone read the e-mail they'd see that as it is all clearly laid out including some numbers. Its good to see not everyone is buying into the sensationalist headlines and /. trolls though.
Regards,
Steve