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Raymond Knocks Fedora, Switches to Ubuntu

Posted by Zonk on from the one-unhappy-penguin dept.

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.'"

4 of 608 comments (clear)

  1. Fedora Responds by spacemky · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Fedora Responds by otis+wildflower · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, at least he has the rocks to put up a cogent flame about it.

      Nonconfrontational folks like me just get fed up with the puritanical bullshit about MP3 playback and NVidia drivers, buy a Macbook, and have done with it.

      I'd have said go Gentoo, which I did for awhile (abandoned about 1yr ago), but I find OS X just a whole lot less stressful than dealing with Yet Another Buggy App or Yet Another Goddamn Artsd Collision or Yet Another Flash Thing That Doesn't Work Well With Linux or Yet Another Codec That Isn't Available On Linux Without Getting The Stinkeye From RMS or Yet Another Ban From WoW For Cedega Use or or or or...

      And I may roll with CentOS at work, but I have no illusions of any 'normals' being happy with it. Even with my pymp'd Baghira themes!

      Crap, gotta kill artsd again...

  2. Re:Why make a stink? by mrcparker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He chose to make it public to show what he's fighting for. He wants Linux to get real, not to be totally out of touch with reality. We need proprietary software, and very often, they need Linux. It's not about fighting with them - it's about cooperating. Haha. Sure he did.

    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.
  3. Re:Disappointed by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Did it bug you that they have ESR do his angry intro to Revolution OS right before your interview is shown? (IIRC, that's how it went...)

    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.