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Raymond Knocks Fedora, Switches to Ubuntu
narramissic writes "After 13 years as a loyal Red Hat user, Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, is switching to the Ubuntu distribution. In a message distributed to Linux mailing lists and news organizations, Raymond cited technical issues with Red Hat, such as the way repositories are maintained, the submission process and 'stagnant' development of Red Hat's packaging technology, as well as governance problems, the failure to gain desktop market share and the failure to include proprietary media formats. 'Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige,' Raymond wrote. 'The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.'"
Can't a prominent OSS person just switch anymore? It seems like they have to make a big political stink out of it. It's really too bad that people can't leave when things are still amicable, and instead they let it boil over to a traditional email flame-fest by the time they act.
While I am normally amused at the cries of "FUD" whenever someone outside the user/developer community criticizes anything that has to do with open source (especially when the criticism is a valid one), things like these I think pretty much paint a picture of a group of people who've become institutionally incapable of absorbing and incorporating criticism of any sort, no matter who it emanates from. One would think Raymond is among the few people who have earned the right to say "wow, this sucks and needs to change". The recent back-and-forth between Torvalds and GNOME is another good example.
Maybe is the mythic "vociferous minority" that also pollutes teh interwebs with the "M$ IS TEH SUXX LINUX ROOLZ" mantra, but whatever it is, it looks damn bad.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What with all the Ubuntu stories of late, far outnumbering the Red Hat/Fedora stories, shouldn't we get a Ubuntu logo on these articles now?
http://www.mhall119.com
I would say it's not about proprietary stuff, it's more about compatibility, market share and choice. If you don't want proprietary drivers, codecs and so on, choose Fedora / Redhat. But if you want usable distro that you can use as a nice desktop OS, without worrying about 'if it's open source or not' go for Ubuntu. Or Linspire. Or Mandriva.
That's the beauty of Linux - something for everybody, you can mix'n'match. The only reason why people speak about it is ESR is a big player in FOSS crusade.
He chose Ubuntu, fine. Don't like it? Find different idol you can follow.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
Yeah, and two replies deep -- after one anti-socialist rant -- gets you to this:
/ 2007-February/msg01083.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list
That is a telling thread and validates part of what Eric is saying:
"After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my
limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me
into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which
an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system
unusable."
Flat out, that should have never been allowed to happen. The fact that it can, and did, highlights what is a fundamental problem with package management on Fedora/Red Hat.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
He used --force or --nodeps when removing that package. It tried to stop him and he overrode it.
Better disable 'cat' since it can be used to erase your hard drive!
Now we'll enjoy his enlightened commentary on the Ubuntu MLs. How many variations on the theme "you don't subscribe my opinion, therefore you're a bumbling fool" will we have to suffer before he jumps ship again? ESR, LFS is over there ->!
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Same thing I posted to LWN yesterday --
ESR seems to be very unprofessional and childish. Examples:
* Regularly sends "open letters", ostensibly to some party he disagrees with, but really to the public. These should either be privately directed to the intended party, or should be addressed to the public.
* Sends this drive-by flame about how he is switching to Ubuntu, without mentioning his financial relationships with Linspire, and by extension, Canonical.
* Makes a speech about how Linux should have nonfree codecs WITHOUT disclosing his financial relationship with a distro that specializes in that. It comes out some time later.
* Made up that stupid story about how Bill Gates insulted him at a conference once, and told it to lots of reporters.
* Threatens people with physical/gun violence (like Bruce Perens), thus hurting the cause of gun rights which he seems to care about.
* His obnoxious "travel rules" -- http://www.catb.org/~esr/travelrules.html
* Claims to speak for everyone in "his movement". Uses "we" a lot when making claims.
* Changed the statement in the jargon file that most hackers tend to be somewhat libertarian, which is probably true, whether you agree with that philosophy or not, to read that most hackers are Neoconservative, which is demonstrably false, again whether or not you agree with that philosophy. He did this because he HIMSELF had become a neoconservative and warblogger.
It becomes a problem when the goal of Fedora is to use Free Software. Cox et al. give a damn about making it easy for people to make derivative distros. Would you fault Debian for being the same way? They're even worse than Fedora when it comes to non-free software.
Fedora has a goal of making it easy to distribute derivatives, just as ESR has different goals of functionality at the expense of freedom. Neither is wrong or right, just different.
Here is part of Cox's response:
Sure, ESR's comment was fairly divisive, but why pour more fuel on the fire? This was divisive enough as a Fedora vs Ubuntu flamewar. Now it's Open Source versus Free Software. And Alan Cox just told Eric Raymond to go and die.
Can you imagine Bill Gates telling Steve Jobs to go screw himself? In fact, I just recently saw some photos of those two hanging out at some social function, chatting and getting along fine. Now my head is filled with the image of Gates and Jobs living it up and having a laugh, with Cox and Raymond hunched over their computers in the background banging out enraged emails to one another.
We can be a fucking embarrassing bunch at times.
If the system leaves you no choice but to override it because it is doing something wrong, and YOU do something wrong, who is at fault? Answer: everyone.
The system is fucking stupid because it still leaves you in dependency hell. I don't really know how people can find the stomach to dispute that. It's like when some program bluescreens windows and people make excuses for it. "Well the program did such and such"... fuck you! No program should ever be able to crash any OS. Mind you, there are ways to panic Linux, as well. I just like to bring up the BSOD whenever possible, since we see it so often, or would if XP didn't default to immediate reboot. And sometimes even then the system crashes so hard it can't reboot itself anyway.
If the system is so broken that it forces the user to do unsupported things, the system needs replacing whether the user is culpable or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So I don't think any mass exodus is solely based on political ideals...
Just junk food for thought...
.... people had been wondering "what the fuck it was ESR was up to lately, since he hadn't gone off on an ill-advised tear in a while".
What exactly *does* ESR contribute these days? I have to be honest when I say that -- while he was in the right place at the right time with the right idea when it came to Open Source -- for the most part the rest of the time I see him as a tremendous Oxygen Thief, stealing valuable oxygen that could be consumed by other more productive folks.
Who cares if ESR uses Red Hat or not? I don't care if he uses Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu or dusts off some Yggdrasil disks, to be honest. Let him use "what works for him."
It's not like he's going to be leading this army of "Red Hat Deserters" or something. If it wasn't for Slashdot running a story about it, nobody would even have noticed or cared....
I think even bigger news is that somebody still pays attention to ESR.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
One of the things that has amazed me about the Linux community (and really, it seems to be a Linux thing; other open-source apps seem to be able to weather honest critiques without all the knee-jerk bile spewing) is its inability to stomach criticism. I read ESR's article, and regardless of what someone might feel about his personality, the article and its writing made sense.
He gave a very reasoned explanation for why he left, and one that deserves consideration. I know I ditched RPM distros for the same reason years ago, and if he's complaining about the same things that I was experiencing back around the turn of the century then I'm very willing to believe his allegation that package management on RH/Fedora has been stagnant for a long time.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming color of the response has been people attacking ESR's personality rather than trying to speak to his criticism. Like you said, it makes us look damn bad. Moreover, it should serve as evidence that ESR is right to any outside observer, since character assassination is usually only used by people who can't actually refute a person's arguments.
Using a dependency resolver like Apt or Yum, I've never suffered dependency hell. Because I'm not retarded enough to add 40 different repos with incompatible builds of the same packages. You pick a set of repos that are intended to work with each other, or you go straight to the owner of the software being package and build your own (or in the event of proprietary software you ask them to provide a build for your distribution). What was the one package he wanted to ugprade? What repo provided it? Why did he use --force and/or --nodeps?
I really don't care who that person is, or who he was. I will judge his arguments based on the arguments only. Even if he is Lucifer himself, that doesn't make his arguments any less or more valid. Learn to avoid ad-hominen attacks, learn to argue the issue and not hte person. That's the only way to get some value from the clash of opinions.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I think Alan Cox's comment pretty much validated what ESR said, so for ESR to respond would be redundant.
ESR said he wants an OS that does what he wants it to do, rather than doing things according to a moral code. Cox said he wants an OS to do things according to a moral code, even if it means he's not able to do some things you want to do.
They agree that they disagree. What more is there to say?
ESR is getting all the attention he wanted, but posting his public letter all over the Linux web sites. Unfortunately, everyone is falling for it. Just because he jumps and down and screams doesn't mean he deserves the attention. It's also interesting how he mixes a few personal technical items with a big political issue. That gets people frothing (on one or the other), but doesn't really provide constructive discussion.
Let's look at the reality:
1) ESR has a package conflict. In an attempt to fix that he removed a library that was critical to the functioning of the package system, and then he was stuck, unable to restore his system.
Users aren't supposed to delete libraries from their system. If they try to do this with the package system it complains and stops them. If you do it by hand or you use the switches that allow you to override the system, then it's up to you to know what you're doing. Obviously ESR didn't know what he was doing, because it caused him these problems. You can sum this up as:
ESR removed the safty, waved the gun around, and pulled the trigger, and then was surprised when he shot himself in the foot. He should know better.
2) ESR didn't say what packages he had a problem with.
A lot of work goes in to making sure the primary Fedora repositories are consistent and work, but mistakes do happen. A bug report would have been more useful than just ranting about it.
I often see consitency problems in unsupported repositories and work around them. They're unsupported, which means it isn't Fedora's fault and is sort of to be expected.
3) ESR wants RPM to be statically linked so this can't happen.
Unfortunately, ESR hasn't looked at the realities of a modern distribution. Statically linking key applications used to be a good idea, but Linux today has a lot of pieces that won't function without shared libraries. Given all the things the package managers do, they need a fully functional system. Statically linked applications work when you're doing system recovery, but that's about it.
4) ESR couldn't fix his system.
Fedora ships with a system recovery disk. It is a full Linux system running from a CD. It's designed to let you fix just about anything that happens with your system. He could reinstalled the missing library by using that. Rescue disks are far from perfect. You really need to understand what you're doing to use them. But he didn't try, and didn't ask for help, and clearly didn't know how to do it himself.
5) ESR is important and everyone should listen to what he says
ESR is no more important than any other developer out there. Developers and users should get listened to. But if you look at the history you'll see that ESR has pulled this sort of histrionics several times before. And if you go through the archives and compare the state of things today, you'll even see that many of ESR's ideas have been implemented regardless of how loudly he shouted about it, and claimed that they've wronged him, and they don't respect his years of work.
Now the big political fight. ESR thinks Linux should include closed source modules when no open source version exists. Since Ubuntu is doing that, he's going to switch to Ubuntu. Good for him. I don't care. There was no reason to send the fact to web site expect to get attention.
It's good that Ubuntu gives you that option. Fedora made the choice to stay 100% open source. Ubuntu may get more people using Linux. That's a good thing. Fedora may get more people to develop the missing pieces. That's a good thing. I can't predict which will be more effective in the long term, so they're both good options. Everyone can make their own choice.
So what do we make of all this? ESR threw a hissy fit, and it got him attention. That's what he wanted so it worked for him. He may have hurt people at Fedora and he may may have attracted more Linux people to Ubuntu. Those are both very selfish actions. Reacting to his hissy fit is bad, because it hurts communication and it promotes more hissy fits in the future. So next time ESR rants, read it for the points it makes, but don't react to the hissy fit. Then maybe next time he'll have a discussion instead of trying to grab attention.
(not you, the parent poster).
...at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."
Reading Eric's message, did anyone get CHILLS down their spine?
ACTUALLY, it was using --force that rendered the system unusable. It's called a SAFETY mechanism.
Quick... someone give this man a nail gun, and show him how 'limiting' it is that the nailgun has to make contact with wood before firing. Someday, we'll read about how ESR dropped something out his car door, reach for it without using PARK, and then we'll hear about how his CAR rendered his shooting finger "unusable". It's always someone else's fault Eric.
There used to be a name for users like this on IRC. I remember seeing new Debian users who install Debian stable, then wontonly mix in Debian Unstable and nightly. The next time they did an apt-get update, this class of user would demand to know why "apt broke my system".
This guy is a poster child for why conservative managers stick with Windows. It's been YEARS since he wrote anything that was genuinely useful and NOT designed to get a headline ('zork' style kernel config manus, anyone?). Did anyone else get a laugh on at the Fedora list quote, how 2006 New Years Resolution was to help the Fedora package folks? Gee it's 2007 now.
Every word or letter from him is blatent self promootion, and should be viewed with the same skepticism reserved for Paul Therriot and their kind. Right now it appears Ubuntu is becoming more popular than Fedora (or at least there's that PERCEPTION), and this alone is ESR's motive for switching.
Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.
It's a little like someone thinking that the way to change the root password is to vi /etc/passwd and insert "secret123" in the second column. By the time they're realized they're not the expert they thought they were, it's too late. And the real answer was to use the "passwd" tool. Why did they do it? Maybe there was a bug in the OS. Perhaps "passwd" didn't work, and so they edited /etc/passwd instead. But why the hell would they edit it? Why not report the problem and let someone who knows what the actual issue is get them the fix?
Alan Cox actually does a reasonable job of explaining why ESR has, essentially, blamed the wrong people for this here. There was a problem. Instead of ESR asking for help, he blindly used the sledgehammer to try to fix the issue himself, despite not knowing what the problem was and what the consequences would be of him using the sledgehammer.
Realistically, I don't think this has anything to do with ESR having a package management meltdown. On some level I suspect ESR knows full well that an ordinary user would never have pulled the same stunt he did, and that he bears the consequences for screwing with something he really didn't know enough about. I think this has to do with being frustrated and "out of love" with Fedora, in much the same way as marriages often break apart supposedly because He never passes the sugar, or She never makes the tea. Ubuntu? Well, of course, it's different, it's popular, and it's populist.
I just don't see the need for press attention over it, or the drama queen act.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.