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Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal
Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."
I'm sure many of us Slashdotters who can't be bothered to read the article, much less do research, would love to know:
Who is this Wieers fellow?
What exactly did Shuttleworth propose?
What's the point of syncing Enterprise Linux releases?
What is and why is Wieers making this big stink?
The government can't save you.
Yes. Shuttleworth would benefit from synchronized releases. If there wasn't some advantage for his project, he wouldn't have suggested it. What he's suggesting is that everyone else would benefit too.
Sure, Red Hat puts a lot of effort into hardware support backports. But if Ubuntu, Debian, Novel and Red Hat all standardized on the same kernel releases for their six-month release cycles then hardware vendors would have one platform to target instead of four. That might very well increase vendor cooperation - even to a sufficient extent that Red Hat would get better hardware support than they have now with less investment.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?
then what Shuttleworth is suggesting is the idea of seasons. If everyone can get on the same page a couple times a year, the rest of the time they can go do their migration, vacationing, rewrites, refactoring, day-jobs, etc. If it makes sense for mother nature, it might just make sense for our software ecosystem.
Emergent cooperation FTW!
claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'
Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."
So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?
Insightful is deserved. Or own the desktop at home, will drag Linux into the enterprise. Something RedHat and Novell have missed completely. If they continue to do so, many might just drag in Ubuntu... I would and will.
If anything, they should put out a home distro cheap and capitalize on Vista's shortcomings.
Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).
Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.
Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.
Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.
They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Here is Mark Shuttleworth's insightful response when I asked him, "Why would Red Hat cooperate with Ubuntu, especially now that Ubuntu also has its sights set on the server market. Don't they consider Ubuntu a threat?"
That's what I don't understand about the name change... unless RedHat intentionally wanted to re-brand Fedora as inferior. They couldn't block 'freeloaders' so make the *free* version seem inferior and suddenly 'poor' people would rather pirate RHEL, download centos or go to another distro.
Give people more credit, especially those trying Linux for the first time.
Redhat Consumer Desktop (don't like consumer, but how about 'Redhat Fedora Desktop' ?)
Redhat Server
Redhat Enterprise Server (LTS)
What's wrong with that? people don't stop buying desktops because they can afford racks. They buy desktops because they cater towards a consumers needs such as graphics rather than power/wattage p/ inch. OS's are the same... You want to download the enterprise server and likely half the functions you want/need will be disabled by default (and vice versa). You want fancy effects, media players and consumer featured stuff you buy the desktop...
Consumers = Server is inferior
Enterprise = Desktop/workstation is inferior
No offence to fedora users (although admittedly I haven't used any rpm based distro in eons) but from my own perspective it would appear RH outsourced the 'consumer' market because they weren't getting any return and in doing so alienated by choice their own brand.
Look at this site:
http://fedoraproject.org/
and then look right down at the very bottom of the page, just squint your eyes:
"
Copyright © 2008 Red Hat, Inc. and others. All Rights Reserved. Please send any comments or corrections to the websites team.
The Fedora Project is maintained and driven by the community and sponsored by Red Hat. This is a community maintained site. Red Hat is not responsible for content.
"
JIMHO, and this is jimho, RedHat appears to have actively DILUTED their own desktop OS on purpose rather than avoid brand confusion.
I'm sure this has been a discussion beaten into the ground, but you did ask for me to elaborate. I have no disrespect for Fedora or its abilities as an OS but I dont believe RH could distance themselves any further without risking an 'unofficial' out of their control distro of Linux
If anything, they should put out a home distro cheap and capitalize on Vista's shortcomings.
No company in there right mind would put linux on a desktop for less than $80 and propose that it replace home users software. I use the price $80, because RH already offers a desktop version for $80.
I think $80 is pretty cheap for a desktop with support. In fact it might be too cheap.
They currently have a distro called Fedora for home users that do not want to pay for support, but I think the average user, would want a stable version such as Enterprise Desktop.
One thing the other distributions haven't figured out is training. NOVL and LTS rely on LPI courses and I honestly haven't seen it go much farther than that for them.
RedHat has a suite of training classes that provide a lot of information on deploying a system for Enterprise/SMB usage. I think the key here is SMB usage, because this provides another level of business security which SMB need, otherwise they just can't use it.
Currently I can find someone who has a knowledge of computers and an descent skillset on linux (LPI). I can then figure out where they are in their knowledge of linux and where I need them to be and select classes for them to take at RedHat. I can't be assured of that with any other distro.
My point being that I don't think linux on the desktop is the great stepping stone we once thought it was going to be. I think it is probably going to be the other way around.
What business is really going to care that a future employee has gaming experience on an operating system? Besides ones looking for game testers.
From my point of view only Ubuntu would benefit from such a synchronized release schedule. Well, I guess then it's best that they change their release cycle to Red Hat's. That's not too difficult to achieve as RH announced its schedules quite early.
So if you want free beer - go and get it yourself!
A consumer desktop? That's what it takes to be a contributor? Let's take a look at RH's opensourcing of jboss, or check the kernel commit list for @redhat.com email addresses. What about the environmental tools spawned from RHEL, such as func, cobbler, and others? Then let's look at what folks like Ubuntu have given back. Sure it's a useful and flashy desktop. What project have they opensourced recently? Where's their contribution back to the community, other than their product?
I know this is just anecdotal evidence, but my girlfriend recently got a M1530 from Dell, which came preinstalled with Vista. She decided she didn't like Vista and wanted to try Ubuntu (since she sees me using it and was curious). She downloaded the ISO, grabbed one of my blank CDs, burned it, put it in the drive, installed it through their Windows-based setup (not wubi), and was set.
The only involvement that I had in this (indeed, this was also the first time I knew she was going to try Ubuntu) was when she IMed me while I was at work and asked why the mouse on her laptop didn't work on Ubuntu. When I got home, I was expecting a botched install that was going to be hell to repair, but it turns out that it was 100% perfect and simply didn't work due to a faulty BIOS. I added the necessary boot argument (i8042.nomux=1) and it's worked perfectly ever since.
Just my $0.02.
I have Fedora on one system because it handles one scenario more easily than Ubuntu, x86_64 having to install third-party 32-bit software. Other than that, the system is frustrating:
-Their 'releases' seem to mean little. They don't stick to the major revisions of software (Fedroa 8 box updated kernel to 2.6.24 and pidgin to 2.4 for example). As a result, third party drivers can exhibit different glitches or not work at all even during a routine update. Pidgin changed its UI and initially started crashing for me a lot when they went to 2.4. No matter what Fedora path you take, you are submitted to the bleeding edge across the board, not just the areas you are intrinsically interested in.
-They have no interest in helping users have a convenient time with binary software. I.e. annoying to install flash, nvidia, or ati binary drivers. It's one thing of the OSS alternatives are remotely comparable, but they simply are not at this point. ath5k when first adopted was no where near good enough for common usage. The nv driver is a waste of paying the nVidia premium. Ditto for the open source ATI driver until those efforts see fruition. And the open-source implementation of flash is getting closer, but is still far removed from a viable alternative.
All in all, Fedora feels to an extent like crippleware and a rolling beta. Knowing explicitly that as a user you are little more than a free tester for RedHat's for-profit endeavor is annoying. If I were interested in a specific major increase of a package such that I didn't want to wait a few months for the next distro rev, I'd download it myself.
Ubuntu's releases are not perfect (the hardy scheduler annoyance a good example), but the complaints are far less severe and I know when an update might require work. I'm too lazy to have to deal with a major change at a random time. It's the reason why I stopped using Gentoo after a couple of years.
Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.