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Fedora's New Test Lead Plans Changes
lisah writes "According to a NewsForge article by Bruce Byfield, new Fedora test lead Will Woods has a laundry list of changes he plans on making to enhance the Fedora testing process. 'There's always someone who will comment that Fedora is just Red Hat's beta test for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),' says Woods. 'It's not true, and I want no one to have cause to say that ever again.'"
From the article: "First introduced to testing at Compaq and IBM, Woods gained enough experience that he was hired two years ago when Red Hat needed someone to develop test automation tools." Testing at Compaq? Compaq tests things!?
Did it take anyone else about five tries to parse that headline?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
It's nice to see them acknowledge a testing issue, and present options to the community on how to best approach the problem.
The amazing thing is all of the people that are critical of Fedora. Even if it were a testbed for RedHat, it is a free distro. that is widely used--especially by the critics. I have no problems with it, and we use it on several development machines here.
If the critics would step up and help solve the problems, they'd quickly run out of things to complpain about.
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But I want Fedora to be a testing place for the next RHEL. I run Fedora on my home network, and 41 (soon to be 89) RHEL boxes at work, plus 3 Fedora Core ones, and widespread testing of packages before they get into RHEL is a Good Thing (TM)
Unlikely...
The problem is Patents, and licensing. If Red Hat wants to license, say, mp3 codec, it needs to pay royalties to Thomson to distribute. Is it likely that Red Hat are not going to pay for licenses for you, since they give you Fedora for free. Downloading the Realplayer RPMs and installing them is no more difficult than installing Realplayer on Windows. In fact, if you double click an RPM in GNOME, GNOME will ask for your root password automatically, and run system-install-packages. Real Networks have licensed the mp3 codec, so they are legally entitled to give them to you (as binaries) in Realplayer. Other codecs, like LAME, or FFMPEG are of questionable legallity (in the US at any rate), so you'll have to get them from unofficial sources. And if you follow http://www.fedorafaq.org/ there are EASY, STEP-BY-STEP instructions as to how to do this. "yum" is not hard to use!
It is also in the Fedora "Constitution" that they will only include software that does not impinge on any licensing or patented tech. This is for a very good reason - The GNU GPL has a clause that says if you include code that you are not legally entitled to (or are later banned from using by a court), then you forfeit the right to distribute the software, either in binaries or as source. Thus if Fedora included mp3 codecs in FC6, Thomson could take them to court, and if they were found in breach of the law, Fedora could no longer distribute FC6 or make any derivatives of it. If Fedora included RealPlayer RPMs in the distribution, they would be breaking their commitment to give you only GPL software, and would be unable to give you the source.
If you want a fully paid-up Linux distro, with licensed mp3 codecs and the rest, buy RHEL or SLED. If you want free($) and Free(OSS) software, then you have to live with the fact there are many people (IP holders in particular), that want to make sure you pay for your license to their technology. They won't be easy on you. Rhythmbox and Totem support things like OGG and FLAC out of the box. These are Free(OSS) technologies. You can use them without infringing any patents. MP3, WMA etc. are patented technologies - you need a license to use them, and no doubt the licenses preclude you from distributing them Free(OSS). Using unofficial, and possibly illegal (depending on your location) software is a choice YOU can take. It is not a choice Fedora can take - Red Hat (US company) would end up in court. Knowingly breaking the law can end Directors in jail, and wipe $millions out of their accounts.
As for no MP3, AAC, WMA support - it's not a bug, it's a liscensing issue. You want to get FC for free, RH can't afford to pay per copy liscenses for those codecs. All 3 of those codecs are build on proprietary algorhythms which require a liscense. So, any US vendor - EU doesn't currently acknowledge software patents - has 2 choices:
- pay each owner a fee.
- not include the codec.
Not entirely surprising, they don't include the codec on the free downloads.It will probably change in about 4 years when the patents on MP3 expire.
It's not Fedora (or Red Hat's) fault that the licensing of those products and the US Laws on those subjects are so anal. Welcome to the age of DRM, patents and vendor lock-in due to the 2 previous reasons.
If you didn't know in the USA you are not allowed to reverse-engineer or even include software that is reverse engineered. You are not allowed to import it, export it or use it. Thus MP3, WMV, AAC support or the DRM-versions of it can not be included in a distro for/created in the USA. If you do, you get massive lawsuits or treated as a terrorist. You can of course go and ask permissions and pay big bucks to Fraunhofer/Thomson, MS or Apple.
Welcome to the Nazi world of the 21st century where the Fuhrers are big companies and the Gestapo respectively SS is represented by lawyers and government. Oh, you can of course always rat out at your favorite kamerat.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
And what, pray tell, is wrong with that?
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...also WMV support isn't available by default because it requires users to have access to Microsoft libraries, which are restricted by the Microsoft EULA. This will also most likely change when we get a GPL'd implementation of VC-1, infact the ffmpeg project is working on it according to the wiki page.
So you're saying that because they use tools to test Fedora, that are tools used to test RHEL, that Fedora is just a test RHEL? So umm, then what were the tools being used on before? Since they were being used on RHEL before Fedora. Either ways, this is moot since, there is nothing wrong with Fedora being testing for RHEL since they serve different purposes.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Well Fedora 5 has been the best FC for me thus far. Many "nice" things work' A lot of my hardware now "just works" and I get about as much or fewer crashes for applications in general. I think the move to the 2.17 kernel brought and the newer gcc version brought with it a lot of new problems.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Absolutely nothing. It seems the context of what I was saying was missed. I use RHEL extensively and am glad that Fedora is used to bug test new releases. My post was confused as why they don't want to be seen as the bug testers for RHEL.
They obviously are the bug testers: they have obligations to RHEL and use the same tools now. This is a good thing. My confusion is why does Fedora want to distance itself away from this? That's what the Slashdot summary seems to indicate: that the Fedora developers don't want to be seen this way. But, when you read the article it clearly indicates the opposite. That's the confusion.
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A simple thing... i want to create a playlist. I want to take 10 of my MP3 files and make a playlist that RealPlayer would play.
So far I have been unable to do this. If there is a way to do this, how come it is not intuitive at all?
And I wish there was something with the simplicity of WinAMP - a player that supports MANY patented file types, and is available for... FREE. If there was a player like that for Linux that you could install with the ease of RealPlayer, I would have been VERY happy. As it stands, to install something requires endless hunt for the right libraries. I had FC4 installed, and ended up upgrading to FC5 since many libraries could not be installed via yum due to circulatory reference (to install i need verion x of library A, and to install library A I need version y of library B, etc...)
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
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Just say no to irreversible processes!
This is interesting, because almost all of the distros based on Fedora (RHEL, CentOS, BLAG) decided to skip 4 because it was considered buggy and go from 3 to 5.
I don't think that most people mind that the fedora project is a place that does QA for RHEL. As a Fedora user, I don't mind if the rawhide testers are doing free QA for RHEL. The problem is that Fedora has no real process in place to ensure that the rawhide process produces a quality product for both the Fedora and RHEL users. Red Hat needs Fedora end users to find significant flaws in their product. RedHat applies these fixes and then branches off a particular Fedora release and tests it in order to produce a quality product.
Basically Red Hat should be applying their extra QA processes to Fedora while it is still in testing instead of only after release. They seem to be moving in that direction. If they can automate the testing that ensures that basic functionality of Fedora works at release time, the users will probably stop referring to it as a beta for RHEL. I know I would be happy if totem, Evolution, xsane, and gnome pilot were verified to be working before each release.