It also require to show who wrote part of the software. So I find it quite interesting that the only obligation is to say who wrote the software, , while MIT license doesn't requires it. Someone could argue that some BSD folks are obsessed with recognition ( since that's the only obligation they feel worth to ask to be enforced on others ) , maybe that's the the perfect demography to create a reality show ( we could call it "Berkeley shore" ) ?
RHEL 6 run gnome 2.X, is supported for 10 years, and work fine on most hardware. So I would take that, or if you do not want to spend a bit of money and do not mind lagging on security, take a centos 6. If they fear change, then give them what will not change, and that's exactly what those distribution offer.
In the same idea, take a debian, the support is quite long enough, and they also ship gnome 2.X. That's also rock solid.
That's a simplification, maybe he is from another country or culture than were he live, maybe he try to do the right thing in such country, but he doesn't know how. Yes, the suggestion were not that great, but the amount of harsh response so far is quite baffling.
And ported is a little misleading, just someone did quick package, but since they need non upstream patch to gnome, they will likely not be accepted by Fedora under this form.
Nope, Canonical is located in England ( Isle of Mann to be precise, cause there is so much cheap and good internet infrastructure there and located near good international airports, and not at all because that's a tax evasion scheme, of course )
In fact, that's already paid by Canonical. They are doing this almost for free in the hope this will drive adoption of Ubuntu. ( now, if the plan was working , they would be able to get money, but they don't, despites claiming to be so successfull on every possible market that they eclipse all others such as RH who, for some reason, are still able to be 10 bigger and have 1 billion in revenue despites that. Seek the error ).
Because someone will tell them this is cheaper. Because they already use some non governement owned infrastructure do for various things ( ie, last time I looked, the phone line were not private one to be used only for governement, the cars, etc ). In fact, even the weapons are not made by the governement directly, but by private companies ( not that this is good, or desirable, and I know that's more complex that ust public/private )
I think they are just saying "if someone want to propose to put our infrastructure there because that's hype, here is what we ask and need". That's IMHO easier to do with a private offer ( especially since lots of things are coming in free software on that part ), but they cannot just say "we will not go there", without giving justification. ( especially since that's the same justification than the requirement for a internal private cloud/IaaS infrastructure )
Burocracy, the name that you use because "discussing with other and try to be democratic" or "planning before doing" is not a good term when you want to criticize people.
And you do realize that Mandrakesoft start in 1998 ? So when you say in the 1990, you are just saying it was good the 2 first year and that's all ?
In fact, the whole point is that in house is a simplification. mandriva SA is controlled by 2 heads, one from JM Crozet, a switzerland business man, and the other by leonid Reiman, a russian "businessman", whose record on the web should explain why no one would say no to him. So basically, what is the reason of a complex strategy is the result of a compromise : - desktop is mainly targetted at russian school and the rosa distribution. Rosa pay people who pushed the incompatibility with Mageia for innovation ( ie, rpm5, new installer, trying to drop drakx tool for python based one ), so they do not want to go back to what they have seen as non working ( of course, only in their mind, just see the drop of mandriva on distrowatch ). - server is where JM Crozet aim to get money, and for these, he need a solid ground, and that's not with the current desktop offering ( where almost everything is ligthly maintained, without a clear roadmap or server feature such as pxe/auto installation, proper ldap/kerberos integration, non broken software like puppet, cfengine, apache, etc ). So he took the safest way of using Mageia, if only because Mageia is dog fooding servers ( Mandriva either switched to Debian or kept unupgraded servers ).
So yeah, that's what they try to explain, without saying the real reason. And the whole "let's give back to the community" is a mess too. If you take a look at those who are in the idea, that's mainly people who are on Rosa side, because they have seen no one competent besides them want to work with them. But the whole stuff is broken, just look at the current controversy around mandala Linux. Despites being the first result ( http://poll.pollcode.com/g9vn_result?v ), russian investor push people to vote for something else, because manda mean pussy in russian. They have some teenagers on a random forum claiming to have gamed the poll ( without any proof, as if people where not boasting on forum ), and so decreted that the current poll is flawed ( but of course, only after seeing the result were not what they wanted ), and they will not use it. Not a good start for community.
While you have a point ( not complete, but still a point ) for the binary issue, the rest is IMHO wrong. People do not seems to have a problem with having a different UI for every other consumer products, like a VCR, DVD player, Set top box. In fact, even in windows world, every scanner maker, or digital camera vendor bundle different software, wanting to add value and feature. Do people leave Windows and consumers electronics because of that ?
Not at all. But maybe that's because few people see this, because people cannot afford having 5 new differents digital camera in a month, and then complain on internet about it ( so everybody start to think that must be true, even if that's not that rational ), while that's the case for linux distributions.
One of the real problem is that software are changing too much for mainstream, so there is no time to have a industry around it to address the need of people who are not in the arm race. On the other hand, there is distribution like RHEL Desktop, SLES, etc that provides binary compatibility, long term support ( aroung 10 year for RHEL ) and are fucking cheaper than windows + associated software, but no one talk of them because "OMG, I need the new firefox 45 and latest version of everything". Some users do not care about that ( and i think most do not care about that, that's why after all Firefox try to make people use the latest version, because that's not compeling by itself for most users ). See how many people are still happy with windows xp.
On the other hand, if you take the free software movement as what it is, ie a offsrping of academic research trying to improve knowledge by sharing, the fast path of innovation is good, and so changing too much just mean doing more research, and that's the goal.
I tend to think that there is more support costs associated with hosting that with websites services. The user target is not the same, and people who pay will feel they need to be supported ( ie, when . Not to mention that there is much larger attack surface ith their vm than with gmail ( gmail being mostly run on the client, with know interaction and limited set of input, vs a vm where anything could happen ). There is also likely more pressure on google ( someone using google compute for spamming or warez, etc ).
So I guess they plan to support everything, but there will surely be some hidden costs they didn't planned sooner or later. And since they already reuse their internal expertise, they already got the benefit of scale, so they should IMHO not think "ok, we have no profit now, but with more users, we will be ok".
Especially with product like deltacloud ( http://deltacloud.apache.org/ ), and the fact that there seems to have no specific API or products , ie, that's just centos and ubuntu servers. You can deploy your code everywhere, it doesn't use specific google stuff ( unless you want to, but that was already the case before ).
I have yet to see how far this will go. They will surely have people because that's Google, but I wonder if they do not simply aim to attack Amazon directly at the important point, the purse. AWS give them recuring money, and permit them to negociate good deal regarding to traffic, Amazon reuse android to compete againt google play ( by directly asking to publishers ).
Centos is not free, it is paid by Red hat ( cause packages and software do not write by them self ), so that also make sense to pay RH if people want to keep Centos alive.
And supporting alone a developper is slightly more expensive than paying a company that does it and that share the load among customers ( cause if the price of a RHEL subscription is counted a around 1000 to 2000$ per year, you still have to pay for his paycheck, for travel and sponsoring ( ie, getting to hackfest ), hardware, etc ), so I would say that you can take around the price of 60 subscriptions just to have someone sitting coding for postgresql for you ( and for this, you have a full time coder not working on your product, cause if you pay a postgresql developpers to make it work on somethig else than pg during work time, you are not sponsoring them that well, and he is no longer a top coder ). In practice, I think that's indeed a good way to do this, but in practice, only few companes are willing to directly sponsor developpers, and only a few, so for the rest, mutualisation of ressources by paying companies sponsoring ( be it RH, or entreprisedb, or any others postgresql supporting companies ) is the way to go.
Oracle didn't buy Sun for the people, there was patents involved, there was also the various trademarks and stuff like that, and they wanted to have a complete stack. However, people told me that Oracle was not a so bad place to work, but i guess the management didn't care about redundancy.
And regarding people leaving, I have also heard of the same pattern when Mandriva acquired Connectiva, ( or Linbox ), with high profiles coders leaving after a while. Sometimes, that's just management screw up ( or just resources rationalisation, like "we do not plan to keep developing this product" ), sometimes that's just people wanting to leave for a while ( especially if, like Sun, the company was not doing very well before being bought ), and the merger is just a electroshock. Seeing others leaving give you incentive to do the same. Or just people who want to try something different, ie nothing rong especially with job per se.
Copyrights/brands do not have that much value most of the time, and RH already has a good brand, so adding more may dilute the current one ( see how most of the product are rebranded as RH-something for the enterprise version ).
Patents have value only if you use them, and there is a patent promise on Red Hat website about what they use patent for ( http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html ). The company is also one of the founding member of Open Invention Network and likely donated patents to the shared pool. There is also few people paid to work on the topic, such as Jan Wildeboer fighting against IP extremism, as he say on his web site, or Red hat have several time tried to express against software patents. So again, that's likely not a major interest.
And finally, acquiring people is nice, but in most country, people are free to leave a company at will, and I am prety sure there is lots of example of people leaving after being acquired ( I think Oracle/Sun is a prime example of that, given some problem that some managers at Oracle caused ). So again, that's nice but IMHO, still risky.
So all of them may be worth to buy, but that's quite expensive for 1) something you do not use 2) something you fight against and 3) something you may not keep. if you start to be stupid
Existing contracts are a investement, but again, that's limited in time. And there isn't much assets, computers often depreciate soon, offices are rented most of the time.
To hire major contributors, or just to put people to work on feature. For example, take openstack. There is people working on this on the interoperability with various RH stack softwares ( http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OpenStack_using_Qpid ). By making sure standard are respected, there is less lock-in, and better software for everybody. Better for RH, since their clients can use their usual stack ( ie, the RH one ), better for the client cause they have more choice, better for the community, cause they can offer easier integration with others users, and because they have more contributers. I guess the only one losing are rabbitmq in this case ( rabbitmq being property of vmware ), and even, they can use interoperability like RH did to get people on their software by competing on features or anything.
You, if OEM wanted to run coreboot, they could do it already, mainly because : - they have the hardware specs ( heck, they are doing it ) - they have the engineers
Yep, that's a part of the issue. Flexibility, and high level management is what should be added to the cluster to be IMHO recognized as cloud ( or IaaS, ie, infrastructure as a service, as others called it because cloud is quite meaningless outside of wheater ).
The first one ( COO ) is some ex-manager from Microsoft. Does Nokia/Elop ring a bell ?
I think Microsoft realised that RHEL is one of their serious competitor, and so want to erode their user database with such a move. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft as a investor of Openlogic,and the fact that Olex interoperate with Exchange does seems weird.
You mean like it would have been with the current "password protected BIOS" ( already there since years ) + "disable boot on cd" ( on bios since years ) + lock on the hardware ? ( cause i do not know for your high school, but where I studied, there was people stealing memory from the labs , so lock preventing case opening were added ).
Maybe they did advocate, and maybe no neutral key issuer was present ? The article say this would be expensive ( like running a certified CA, with audit, stuff like that ), and they surely advocated. Doesn't mean they managed to do it however.
And so far, that's a proposal, nothing more. If accepted, this would be done quite fast, but the best way is to find a better idea.
I guess Canonical will do the same as usual, copy what other did and pay 99$ ( and this is not a joke, they were present in the NDAed meetings hinted in the article, see fedora-devel ). I suspect Debian will refuse on philosophical ground, or will still not finish the flamewar until Windows 11 is out..
The article speak of trying to convince OEMs, and Red Hat has been fighting Microsoft on the patent level ( never wondered who gave patent to the OIN ? ), have been trying to lobby the congress ( there is some people paid just to do evangelism ), pay developpers on various interoperability stuff ( there is samba devs, libreoffice devs, etc, paid by Red Hat ).
So saying that Red Hat is unwilling to fight is IMHO ignoring some facts. And that's a proposal yet, this will be discussed like the rest by Fedora board.
Slashdot Mirror
It also require to show who wrote part of the software. So I find it quite interesting that the only obligation is to say who wrote the software, , while MIT license doesn't requires it. Someone could argue that some BSD folks are obsessed with recognition ( since that's the only obligation they feel worth to ask to be enforced on others ) , maybe that's the the perfect demography to create a reality show ( we could call it "Berkeley shore" ) ?
RHEL 6 run gnome 2.X, is supported for 10 years, and work fine on most hardware. So I would take that, or if you do not want to spend a bit of money and do not mind lagging on security, take a centos 6. If they fear change, then give them what will not change, and that's exactly what those distribution offer.
In the same idea, take a debian, the support is quite long enough, and they also ship gnome 2.X. That's also rock solid.
That's a simplification, maybe he is from another country or culture than were he live, maybe he try to do the right thing in such country, but he doesn't know how. Yes, the suggestion were not that great, but the amount of harsh response so far is quite baffling.
Fedora user.
And ported is a little misleading, just someone did quick package, but since they need non upstream patch to gnome, they will likely not be accepted by Fedora under this form.
Nope, Canonical is located in England ( Isle of Mann to be precise, cause there is so much cheap and good internet infrastructure there and located near good international airports, and not at all because that's a tax evasion scheme, of course )
In fact, that's already paid by Canonical. They are doing this almost for free in the hope this will drive adoption of Ubuntu. ( now, if the plan was working , they would be able to get money, but they don't, despites claiming to be so successfull on every possible market that they eclipse all others such as RH who, for some reason, are still able to be 10 bigger and have 1 billion in revenue despites that. Seek the error ).
Because someone will tell them this is cheaper. Because they already use some non governement owned infrastructure do for various things ( ie, last time I looked, the phone line were not private one to be used only for governement, the cars, etc ). In fact, even the weapons are not made by the governement directly, but by private companies ( not that this is good, or desirable, and I know that's more complex that ust public/private )
I think they are just saying "if someone want to propose to put our infrastructure there because that's hype, here is what we ask and need". That's IMHO easier to do with a private offer ( especially since lots of things are coming in free software on that part ), but they cannot just say "we will not go there", without giving justification. ( especially since that's the same justification than the requirement for a internal private cloud/IaaS infrastructure )
Burocracy, the name that you use because "discussing with other and try to be democratic" or "planning before doing" is not a good term when you want to criticize people.
And you do realize that Mandrakesoft start in 1998 ? So when you say in the 1990, you are just saying it was good the 2 first year and that's all ?
In fact, the whole point is that in house is a simplification. mandriva SA is controlled by 2 heads, one from JM Crozet, a switzerland business man, and the other by leonid Reiman, a russian "businessman", whose record on the web should explain why no one would say no to him. So basically, what is the reason of a complex strategy is the result of a compromise :
- desktop is mainly targetted at russian school and the rosa distribution. Rosa pay people who pushed the incompatibility with Mageia for innovation ( ie, rpm5, new installer, trying to drop drakx tool for python based one ), so they do not want to go back to what they have seen as non working ( of course, only in their mind, just see the drop of mandriva on distrowatch ).
- server is where JM Crozet aim to get money, and for these, he need a solid ground, and that's not with the current desktop offering ( where almost everything is ligthly maintained, without a clear roadmap or server feature such as pxe/auto installation, proper ldap/kerberos integration, non broken software like puppet, cfengine, apache, etc ). So he took the safest way of using Mageia, if only because Mageia is dog fooding servers ( Mandriva either switched to Debian or kept unupgraded servers ).
So yeah, that's what they try to explain, without saying the real reason. And the whole "let's give back to the community" is a mess too. If you take a look at those who are in the idea, that's mainly people who are on Rosa side, because they have seen no one competent besides them want to work with them. But the whole stuff is broken, just look at the current controversy around mandala Linux. Despites being the first result ( http://poll.pollcode.com/g9vn_result?v ), russian investor push people to vote for something else, because manda mean pussy in russian. They have some teenagers on a random forum claiming to have gamed the poll ( without any proof, as if people where not boasting on forum ), and so decreted that the current poll is flawed ( but of course, only after seeing the result were not what they wanted ), and they will not use it. Not a good start for community.
No, from their OEM ( ie, OEM shipping Ubuntu ).
The whole point of being certified is that, checking the software and that it run. If Canonical certify something without verifying, that's not good.
While you have a point ( not complete, but still a point ) for the binary issue, the rest is IMHO wrong.
People do not seems to have a problem with having a different UI for every other consumer products, like a VCR, DVD player, Set top box. In fact, even in windows world, every scanner maker, or digital camera vendor bundle different software, wanting to add value and feature. Do people leave Windows and consumers electronics because of that ?
Not at all. But maybe that's because few people see this, because people cannot afford having 5 new differents digital camera in a month, and then complain on internet about it ( so everybody start to think that must be true, even if that's not that rational ), while that's the case for linux distributions.
One of the real problem is that software are changing too much for mainstream, so there is no time to have a industry around it to address the need of people who are not in the arm race. On the other hand, there is distribution like RHEL Desktop, SLES, etc that provides binary compatibility, long term support ( aroung 10 year for RHEL ) and are fucking cheaper than windows + associated software, but no one talk of them because "OMG, I need the new firefox 45 and latest version of everything". Some users do not care about that ( and i think most do not care about that, that's why after all Firefox try to make people use the latest version, because that's not compeling by itself for most users ). See how many people are still happy with windows xp.
On the other hand, if you take the free software movement as what it is, ie a offsrping of academic research trying to improve knowledge by sharing, the fast path of innovation is good, and so changing too much just mean doing more research, and that's the goal.
Maybe the issue is just misplaced expectations.
I tend to think that there is more support costs associated with hosting that with websites services. The user target is not the same, and people who pay will feel they need to be supported ( ie, when . Not to mention that there is much larger attack surface ith their vm than with gmail ( gmail being mostly run on the client, with know interaction and limited set of input, vs a vm where anything could happen ). There is also likely more pressure on google ( someone using google compute for spamming or warez, etc ).
So I guess they plan to support everything, but there will surely be some hidden costs they didn't planned sooner or later. And since they already reuse their internal expertise, they already got the benefit of scale, so they should IMHO not think "ok, we have no profit now, but with more users, we will be ok".
Especially with product like deltacloud ( http://deltacloud.apache.org/ ), and the fact that there seems to have no specific API or products , ie, that's just centos and ubuntu servers. You can deploy your code everywhere, it doesn't use specific google stuff ( unless you want to, but that was already the case before ).
I have yet to see how far this will go. They will surely have people because that's Google, but I wonder if they do not simply aim to attack Amazon directly at the important point, the purse. AWS give them recuring money, and permit them to negociate good deal regarding to traffic, Amazon reuse android to compete againt google play ( by directly asking to publishers ).
Centos is not free, it is paid by Red hat ( cause packages and software do not write by them self ), so that also make sense to pay RH if people want to keep Centos alive.
And supporting alone a developper is slightly more expensive than paying a company that does it and that share the load among customers ( cause if the price of a RHEL subscription is counted a around 1000 to 2000$ per year, you still have to pay for his paycheck, for travel and sponsoring ( ie, getting to hackfest ), hardware, etc ), so I would say that you can take around the price of 60 subscriptions just to have someone sitting coding for postgresql for you ( and for this, you have a full time coder not working on your product, cause if you pay a postgresql developpers to make it work on somethig else than pg during work time, you are not sponsoring them that well, and he is no longer a top coder ).
In practice, I think that's indeed a good way to do this, but in practice, only few companes are willing to directly sponsor developpers, and only a few, so for the rest, mutualisation of ressources by paying companies sponsoring ( be it RH, or entreprisedb, or any others postgresql supporting companies ) is the way to go.
Oracle didn't buy Sun for the people, there was patents involved, there was also the various trademarks and stuff like that, and they wanted to have a complete stack. However, people told me that Oracle was not a so bad place to work, but i guess the management didn't care about redundancy.
And regarding people leaving, I have also heard of the same pattern when Mandriva acquired Connectiva, ( or Linbox ), with high profiles coders leaving after a while. Sometimes, that's just management screw up ( or just resources rationalisation, like "we do not plan to keep developing this product" ), sometimes that's just people wanting to leave for a while ( especially if, like Sun, the company was not doing very well before being bought ), and the merger is just a electroshock. Seeing others leaving give you incentive to do the same. Or just people who want to try something different, ie nothing rong especially with job per se.
Copyrights/brands do not have that much value most of the time, and RH already has a good brand, so adding more may dilute the current one ( see how most of the product are rebranded as RH-something for the enterprise version ).
Patents have value only if you use them, and there is a patent promise on Red Hat website about what they use patent for ( http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html ). The company is also one of the founding member of Open Invention Network and likely donated patents to the shared pool. There is also few people paid to work on the topic, such as Jan Wildeboer fighting against IP extremism, as he say on his web site, or Red hat have several time tried to express against software patents. So again, that's likely not a major interest.
And finally, acquiring people is nice, but in most country, people are free to leave a company at will, and I am prety sure there is lots of example of people leaving after being acquired ( I think Oracle/Sun is a prime example of that, given some problem that some managers at Oracle caused ). So again, that's nice but IMHO, still risky.
So all of them may be worth to buy, but that's quite expensive for 1) something you do not use 2) something you fight against and 3) something you may not keep. if you start to be stupid
Existing contracts are a investement, but again, that's limited in time. And there isn't much assets, computers often depreciate soon, offices are rented most of the time.
To hire major contributors, or just to put people to work on feature. For example, take openstack. There is people working on this on the interoperability with various RH stack softwares ( http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OpenStack_using_Qpid ). By making sure standard are respected, there is less lock-in, and better software for everybody. Better for RH, since their clients can use their usual stack ( ie, the RH one ), better for the client cause they have more choice, better for the community, cause they can offer easier integration with others users, and because they have more contributers. I guess the only one losing are rabbitmq in this case ( rabbitmq being property of vmware ), and even, they can use interoperability like RH did to get people on their software by competing on features or anything.
( of course, that's a almost ideal example )
You, if OEM wanted to run coreboot, they could do it already, mainly because :
- they have the hardware specs ( heck, they are doing it )
- they have the engineers
In fact, if you take a look on the blog of coreboot, you can see stuff like this :
http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2011/05/06/amd-commits-to-coreboot/
Yep, that's a part of the issue. Flexibility, and high level management is what should be added to the cluster to be IMHO recognized as cloud ( or IaaS, ie, infrastructure as a service, as others called it because cloud is quite meaningless outside of wheater ).
Well, look where the company management :
http://www.openlogic.com/company/team/
The first one ( COO ) is some ex-manager from Microsoft. Does Nokia/Elop ring a bell ?
I think Microsoft realised that RHEL is one of their serious competitor, and so want to erode their user database with such a move. I would not be surprised to see Microsoft as a investor of Openlogic ,and the fact that Olex interoperate with Exchange does seems weird.
You mean like it would have been with the current "password protected BIOS" ( already there since years ) + "disable boot on cd" ( on bios since years ) + lock on the hardware ? ( cause i do not know for your high school, but where I studied, there was people stealing memory from the labs , so lock preventing case opening were added ).
Maybe they did advocate, and maybe no neutral key issuer was present ? The article say this would be expensive ( like running a certified CA, with audit, stuff like that ), and they surely advocated. Doesn't mean they managed to do it however.
And so far, that's a proposal, nothing more. If accepted, this would be done quite fast, but the best way is to find a better idea.
I guess Canonical will do the same as usual, copy what other did and pay 99$ ( and this is not a joke, they were present in the NDAed meetings hinted in the article, see fedora-devel ). I suspect Debian will refuse on philosophical ground, or will still not finish the flamewar until Windows 11 is out..
You have the option of adding your key. I am quite sure that you can also ask to some chineses manufactures to do a MB for you.
The article speak of trying to convince OEMs, and Red Hat has been fighting Microsoft on the patent level ( never wondered who gave patent to the OIN ? ), have been trying to lobby the congress ( there is some people paid just to do evangelism ), pay developpers on various interoperability stuff ( there is samba devs, libreoffice devs, etc, paid by Red Hat ).
So saying that Red Hat is unwilling to fight is IMHO ignoring some facts. And that's a proposal yet, this will be discussed like the rest by Fedora board.