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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.'"
The fedora-devel-list has already responded to this, as well as Alan Cox himself.
Personally, I'd like to see ESR's response to these rebuffs.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
I want to know WTF Cox is talking about when he says that "The moment Fedora includes non-free stuff it becomes a problem for all the people who redistribute and respin it". The people who respin it aren't your problem. You're not obligated to support them. They're making a derivative let them derive. The people who redistribute don't have a problem so long as your licensing agreement permits redistribution. As for the statement "it becomes unfair in the proprietary world in the eyes of everyone who didn't get included", uh, so? Life isn't fair. Love isn't fair. Nothing important is. If they want to court redhat users, they can do that without any help from redhat.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I did the same thing around the time the colossal mess that was Fedora Core 3 was out. Most of the Linux users I know (which amounts to around 40 or so people I work with and know socially) have switched from Redhat to Ubuntu (or OSX) for desktops and laptops. And a lot of us have switched to Solaris 10/Express for servers. Naturally the Debian users I know still use Debian :)
Looking back, I should have left Redhat around 7.3, which was the last good and consistently stable RH release.
Finkployd
Hmmm... that's just a load of bull.
o ra_core6
3 Months ago I installed Ubuntu.. in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and installing Automatix, I could do stuff.
2 days ago I replaced that Ununtu desktop with Fedora 6... in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and finding the excellent HowoToForge doc on spiffing up Fedora,:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fed
I could do everything I wanted with just slightly more effort. (My reasons for switching has nothing to do with not liking Ubuntu. Its just that my hard drive crashed and I wanted to try Fedora 6 upon re-installing a new desktop).
Out of the box, both Distros offer the same capabilities, and lack of proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. The user has to do it for themselves by going to third part websites for these.
Newsfollow.com
He also just happened to join the Freespire board. Freespire is Linspire, a company which just signed a deal with Ubuntu. hrmm
His argument was a bit valid, but it is not Red Hat's fault - it is the people who own all of the little Fedora repositories that have not really worked well together. Fedora is about software freedom, and Eric cares about getting Linux everywhere no matter what. I am not really sure where ESR stands on the whole freedom argument, or if he only cares about challenging Microsoft.
I miss the days of redhat 9 when there was 1 super good version. Good enough for corporate and home with a single distro. Ubuntu might be good for home, but there is no support for bigname devices.
If yum can't install a package for an end-user, the *package* is broken, not the packaging system. BTW, someone mentioned false auto-dependencies on Perl script examples in the %doc directory. I haven't run into this, but there is "Autoreq: 0" and "Requires: ...". A pain for the package builder, but not for the end-user.
The only "dependency hell" I've ever had with yum is when building source RPMs - and of course that doesn't use yum. I would like yum to (optionally) auto-install build dependencies (but sometimes you have to build the build dependencies from source). In my dreams, building from source would be as smooth as gentoo. I've heard a rumor that this is coming.
After building a package from source, I'll try a direct rpm. But if that is missing stuff, I just copy my new package to my own repository and let yum do all the dependency chasing!
Nah, I'm pretty thick-skinned by now. It didn't even bug me when Richard Stallman and I were presenting at the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, and I said something about how the Open Source folks were standing on Richard's shoulders, and Richard covered his shoulders! It's in this video. That one was damn funny, classic Richard.
What bothers me is that this eminently trivial story about Eric quitting Fedora gets on Slashdot, and when I need you folks to help with something really important, for example, by voting for the only Secretary of State candidate in California who supports Open Voting, that gets killed. Slashdot used to be an important site in the Open Source world. They took the readers and made it a "geek culture" site. And that's a shame. The "firehose" hasn't helped, it seems. An editor's job is to uplift the content, marking schemes seem to cater to the lowest common denominator.
* 2007-02-05 15:54:23 Open Hardware License - Call for Public Review (Features,Hardware Hacking) (rejected)
* 2006-11-03 00:53:13 Novell-Microsoft: It's About Software Patenting (Linux,Patents) (rejected)
* 2006-06-30 01:06:08 Software Patent Lawsuits Against Open Source (Politics,Patents) (accepted)
* 2006-04-14 21:31:56 California to consider Open Source Voting Bill (Index,Software) (rejected)
Bruce Perens.
While on the whole, I'm happy with Debian, one still has to watch what apt-get does. To install one package, aptitude (apt-get shell) invited me to remove my entire KDE desktop and chunks of gnome. I decided that it was time to quit while I was still behind.
And the chances of getting a source-build to work on Debian distros is no better than it is on Fedora. I'd love to see someone come up with an automatic build-from-source program for Debian. (I mean from tarballs)
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