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

Giving up on Fedora?

[cashman73]

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,... ;-)

Re:Giving up on Fedora?

[bout]

> 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

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.

RedHat / Fedora Are Not Dead

[Doug Dante]

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.

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.

Is There Any Actual Thinking Going On?

[RichiP]

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.

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