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What's Fedora Up To? Ask the Project Leader

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-all-hats-are-red dept.

Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack offered himself up for this interview because, he said, "I look at stories like [your] posting Ubuntu to Bring About Red Hat's Demise and many of the comments about Red Hat and Fedora seem very rooted in the world of several years ago, when the RHEL/Fedora split took place." This is a chance to clear the air, and get an up-to-date look at what Fedora is up to these days. So ask away; we'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Max and (hopefully) publish his answers later this week.

6 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Why such a divide? by dsginter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems to me that 'Linux should be Linux'. Rather, we're seeing articles about one linux distro killing another. We never see "Windows Professional is killing Windows Home". IMHO, Ubuntu's success should be a boon for all Linux distros.

    Unfortunately, package management seems to be the great divide. What are you doing to bring One Package Manager to all Linux?

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    More
  2. Re:Drivers Vs Linux by another_fanboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wifi as well.

  3. Goals by redkazuo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While Ubuntu has a clear, selfless mission, it seems to me the Fedora project misses this. I'm sure while Fedora was still within Red Hat, its mission was simply commercial. "It must be good so we can make money." That mission no longer applies, and http://fedora.redhat.com/About/ almost sounds like Fedora is just a rejected part of Red Hat, left Free so that they could attempt to profit from community contributions.

    Is there an objective in the Fedora Project? One that is clear and may motivate developers to join? Or is it here really just to reduce costs for the Red Hat team?

  4. Support for Free Drivers by ettlz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fedora has a very strong sense of purity in keeping its distro Free, and I like this (no, I don't mind having to visit Livna for MP3, etc.). Further to the goal of a completely Free system, can we expect to see the Fedora project becoming more vocal about Free drivers, and standing besides our neighbours in the OpenBSD community (amongst others) in pressuring hardware providers for open specifications?

  5. Why do you even matter? by stonewolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I will admit that I have a chip on my shoulder. I was a happy user of Redhat. I loved it. It was reasonably priced, it gave me a reliable way to maintain my OS and it just worked. I chose RedHat after testing several other commercial versions of Linux. I had a whole shelf full of boxed Linux distros before I finally settled on RedHat. I was a real fan and a strong supporter. I bought your boxed products and paid a subscription fee for support. I was the kind of customer I would love to have.

    Shortly after I had paid the one year subscription fee for your support network your company sent me an email that basically said, we don't want your business, and oh bye the way, we are keeping your money and cutting off the service you just paid for. Your idea of compensation was to offer me a discount on the same product at a much higher price. In other words, you robbed me and then tried to extort even more money from me. You are nothing but thieves. Even Microsoft has never actually taken my money and given me nothing in return.

    After that experience I was forced to waste time seeking a new distribution and converting all my computers. The time cost to do that was much greater than the dollar value of the service fees you stole from me. If you count my lost time and revenue I am out several thousand dollars because of you. So, you might say I am a little bit biased against your company. I wouldn't actually spit on you if I were to meet you face to face, but I would like to.

    OTOH, I found Debian and found that I had been paying RedHat for something I can get for free from Debian. Recently I converted my desktops and laptops to Ubuntu, an even better solution than Debian, and again for free.

    So, considering that there are better versions of Linux available from honest organizations, organizations who have never robbed their customers, I have to ask WHY DO YOU MATTER. Aside from suckering stupid big companies into over paying for your software, what service do you provide that is even worth the time to read about?

    Stonewolf

  6. I'd consider this a Real Problem... by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful
    ...if it weren't for the fact that there are a VAST number of drivers that are not being included in distros. Madwifi covers a lot of wifi cards, for example. Then, there are drivers for "less common" hardware - WANPIPE is provided by one manufacturer for their T1 cards and there's even patches out there for the LEON architecture, the Texas Instruments OMAP architecture, nanosecond clocks, the VME bus, etc.


    On that basis, I'll ask my question: Users are forever complaining about a lack of drivers, but the drivers they are often presented with are a very small subset of the Open Source drivers that exist. Is this a problem Fedora will be addressing, or will it be largely left to such drivers being absorbed into the mainstream kernel?

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)