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Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jun 03, 2005 12:32 PM
from the growing-up dept.
Businesses Red Hat Software Software Linux
Blahbooboo3 writes "In a bid to attract a larger following among developers, Red Hat has spun off its Fedora open source project into a more independent foundation. As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support." From the article: "The proposed patents common, which mimics the Creative Commons licensing scheme for creative works including art and music, is designed to enable developers to exchange ideas with fewer concerns about patent infringement. and Red Hat's efforts to lobby for patent reform in the U.S. and Europe."
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  • As of yet... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ImaLamer (260199) <john.lamar@gmail . c om> on Friday June 03 2005, @12:36PM (#12715812) Homepage Journal
    I see nothing on Redhat's site or the Fedora site about this.

    Wouldn't that be the first place I should be looking?

  • Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anandpur (303114) on Friday June 03 2005, @12:38PM (#12715832)
    Is this because ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] is gaining popularity and large number of GNOME developres are in ubuntu camp?

    • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LnxAddct (679316) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Friday June 03 2005, @12:57PM (#12716070) Homepage
      Fedora's growth rate is 3 times that of the next fastest growing distro, Gentoo. In a little under 2 years Fedora has over 400,000 live servers on the net (yes a few were prior RH servers, but estimates show only about 10,000 - 20,000). Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers. Fedora is overtaking Suse (they are about 25,000 servers apart). The two biggest distros are Red Hat Enterprise with 1.6 million servers and Debian with 760,000 servers. Most of the Ubuntu users are previous Debian testing and unstable users and previous Gentoo users. Red Hat is currently by far the biggest supporter of Gnome, the only company that ever claim close was Ximian. Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Gnome including developers, HIGs, user studies, quality assurance, and general advancement of the free desktop. Ubuntu is not even in the same ballpark as Fedora, its users just make a lot of noise and its founder has a lot of money for PR.
      Regards,
      Steve

      • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Funny)

        by chrisbtoo (41029) on Friday June 03 2005, @02:26PM (#12716876) Homepage Journal
        Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers

        There would be a load more than that, but we're all still waiting for it to finish compiling.
          • How did they abandon anyone? By no longer putting a RH desktop distro on store shelves? It wasn't profitable.

            We can argue about the profitablility aspect. I don't think it costs a lot to press a CD and print a box, though. If you're saying that they thought they could make more money focusing on the "enterprise" market, you're right.

            About the abandonment aspect, most Linux geeks were very much put out by Red Hat's decision to discontinue the non-enterprise product and to de-support it. They left everyo

  • what about KDE? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Karma Sucks (127136) on Friday June 03 2005, @12:39PM (#12715850)
    Will this finally put KDE development on an equal footing with GNOME in Fedora? Will KDE improvements from KDE developers to the RPM packages in Fedora now be accepted?

    Right now KDE suffers a big disadvantage vs GNOME. It is held crippled by "desktop" rules but not in the same way as GNOME. The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream like PlastiK defaults.

    So, I say again, will this be an opportunity for true improvement of KDE in Fedora? And if not, why not?
    • Good point. I have never had much experience with KDE - mainly because I've always used RH or FC and GNOME is much better represented.
      • Most of my Linux experience was with Mandrake, and even that uses GNOME by default. I've always prefered the Look&Feel of KDE, though. Having said that, I've yet to use a K app that I liked.
        • I know what you mean. I wish the look and feel guys from KDE would get together with the application guys of gnome. work together rather than seperately. right now we have competeing desktops that both suck. Picking and choosing and combining efforts would work much better.
    • "The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream"

      I have no idea what you're talking about. Fedora Core always includes an updated version of KDE. FC4 has KDE 3.4.0, for instance.

      -Erwos
          • Hey jackass, I'm SAYING Fedora is neglecting KDE compared to GNOME which is clearly true given that KDE is using an OLD and OUTDATED Redhat theme compared to the new theme GNOME is using, not to mention like others have said no OOo-KDE, no GTK-Qt, no KDE configuration tools for Fedora, and I'm ASKING whether this change will allow KDE lovers to take matters into their own hands.

            Get it, now?

    • Re:what about KDE? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jason Earl (1894) on Friday June 03 2005, @01:01PM (#12716111) Homepage

      My guess is that Red Hat will primarily be paying Red Hat engineers to work on Gnome, and I would also bet that the folks that work on FC will continue to work on making the Gnome and KDE stuff look similar. In other words the KDE stuff will continue to look like the Gnome stuff.

      For this to change then the KDE community would have to get a lot more involved with the FC community. In fact, they would have to get enough involved that they could change the course of the distribution. I am not part of the FC community, but I have watched enough Free Software projects that I would be very surprised if this signalled a big change. Red Hat is doing all it can to make Fedora as independent as possible, but it still is going to be providing the bulk of the actual development time.

  • Reaction to Ubuntu success? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by georgep77 (97111) on Friday June 03 2005, @12:40PM (#12715855) Homepage Journal
    It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions. As in the commercial world open source projects live and die by "mindshare" almost as much as technical merit. The spinning off of Fedora sounds like an attempt to recapture some lost mindshare.

    Cheers,
    _GP_

    • Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon (326346) on Friday June 03 2005, @01:03PM (#12716125)
      " It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions."

      I don't think so. The people who go for Ubuntu seem to be in large part the same people who went for Gentoo a year ago (and were making these sorts of comments then as well) - and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006. They're a very vocal group - especially in places like /. - but the actual installed base is pretty inconsequential.
      • Well there is always http://distrowatch.com/> but just in general "mindshare" I get the impression that Ubuntu is gaining favor with many Linux advocates.

        _GP_
      • Hard numbers [slashdot.org]. Well, you can decide how meaningful those Nicholas Petreley surveys are -- I have my doubts but the esteemed editors of this site certainly found them trustworthy when it came to Microsoft bashing.

        But beyond that, I'll throw in purely anecdotal agreement with the others. I can't recall commercial distributions ever having such a low profile in the overall distro picture.

      • The business model seems to be providing technical support, and the CDs help spreading the distribution and make it common. And it works. I've several friends who've switched because they got those CDs, two of them permanently (well, we'll see if it lasts) from being Windows users to 100% Ubuntu.

        Also, I read an interview somewhere with the very rich guy who sponsors the whole thing where he said that he hopes he can eventually make money of it this way, but if not, he doesn't mind spending some of his mone
          • Maybe "technical support" is misleading? I can think of lots of other things to do apart from fixing bugs and problems, although I suspect providing some kind of commercial grade guarantees that any problems will be fixed would be a valid business model too, at least for some companies.

            For instance, you could very well charge money for developing certain, possibly quite specialized, features for the distribution that is otherwise lower on the general priorities list. Or for helping to migrate to it from ot

  • Change of Direction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geomon (78680) on Friday June 03 2005, @12:41PM (#12715871) Homepage Journal
    I see that they are willing to support "new Fedora" with engineering and financial assistance, but I wonder how long they will continue to help if the disto takes a turn that they do not support.

    What if Fedora begins to look, over time, more like Debian? Would they continue to provide engineering and financial support for that?

    An earlier article [slashdot.org] about Redhat developers wanting to dump old platforms may indicate how tolerant they are in supporting ideals that do not fit into their business model.

      • The folks at Red Hat have been doing this for a while. They know that when push comes to shove the folks doing the development control the direction of the project, and since Red Hat is going to be paying for piles of engineering time then they will have most of the control. It's possible that a few highly motivated outsiders might make a splash, but that's what Red Hat is *trying* to accomplish by opening up the process. Don't be surprised if Red Hat makes a habit of hiring (or "sponsoring") prominent n

  • Thats good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brickballs (839527) <brickballs@@@gmail...com> on Friday June 03 2005, @12:41PM (#12715873) Homepage
    Fedoras a decent operating system, I'v used it at times before. but what I'm really interested in is the patent reform.

    From the article:

    "Red Hat also promises to bolster its work on patent reform. After his discussion on open source licensing on Thursday, Webbink told CRN that many vendors including Red Hat and Nokia are pushing for is patent and copyright reforms because current laws presents obstacles to the open source movement. For its part, Red Hat is working with the European Parliament to modify the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive, Red Hat said. In the U.S., Red Hat has called for reform of the patent system to ensure better patent quality."

    It looks to me linke Europs really doing better on patent reform than the US. I'm really hoping that we can get our stuff together here stateside before its too late.
  • I wonder what lessons, if any, Red Hat has learned from the past two years, and if they would do it all over again?
      • I should clarify...

        Red Hat pissed a lot of people off by killing off their "junior" releases (Red Hat 8.0, 9.0, etc.) and I know a lot of businesses that dumped them in favor of other distros.

        I like Fedora, but what I am wondering is if they would have gone about killing off the other versions like they did the same way, or would they have gently migrated people over to Fedora.

        Just curious...that's all.
  • This is good news. Next, we need "Full Democracy" in selecting foundation officials. We could adopt Debian's approach.

    • Re:Need of full democracy (Score:4, Insightful)

      by winkydink (650484) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Friday June 03 2005, @12:56PM (#12716049) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, look how fast Debian has been able to move and adapt.

      IMHO, well-managed projects need a benevolent dictator at the top to keep things moving.

    • Re:Need of full democracy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eviltypeguy (521224) on Friday June 03 2005, @01:08PM (#12716174)
      One problem with that theory. You criticize Fedora for not being like Debian, even though Fedora's control structure is roughly the same as Ubuntu's. Yet, both Ubuntu and Fedora have none of the problems that Debian has. That isn't to say that Fedora and Ubuntu are equally successful, but they're both more successful than Debian. Tell me again why they should adopt Debian's approach, when it has failed and Fedora and Ubuntu are successful by comparison?
  • It has been a while since I've followed the redhat camp. I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades. As recently as a few months ago, my brother in law switched to Gentoo in frustration after he ran into too much hastle trying to get a SQL package installed on his redhat laptop. The last thing I heard with a bearing on this topic was work being done by Ian Murdock attempting to bring Redhat and Debian closer together [arstechnica.com]
    • "I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades"

      It's called "yum". It works pretty well now - the speed issues have been solved, and it's on more or less equal footing with apt, at least in my experience. Dependency issues are more or less dead, and have been since FC1.

      -Erwos
    • It feels like RedHat. That's enough for some people.

      (*shrug* I dunno, that's only a guess. I use Debian Sarge)

    • Off the top of my head...
      • Association with the Redhat brand, and therefore similar tools, look & feel, etc.
      • More recently released packages (this can go both ways)
      • Pretty GUI installer, if you like that kind of thing
      • People (well, slashdot people) really underestimate the value of brand recognition. Red Hat will make money because for a large class of people when they think Linux the first two names are Red Hat and IBM. Most people do not go looking for all the variants to find the best one (or the cheapest), they choose based on name recognition - because that is easier, and there is an underlying assumption that if everyone else is using it, they must be doing something right.

        Red Hat and IBM own this space. (Of co
    • The brim keeps the rain off your face, whereas a Debian tin-foil skullcap doesn't.
    • One reason to use it is when you have split environments.

      Example: Production/Development/Test

      You want the same look and feel/packages installed the same way on ALL servers, but you only want to pay for premium support for the prod servers. So use RHEL on those, and Fedora on Dev/Test to save money on licensing.

    • Why use XXXX? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bogie (31020)
      What advantages does it have over distro X? Different strokes for different folks my friend. Why ask why and invite the flames?

      btw what's with all the Ubuntu posts claiming that it somehow has something to do with this decision. How arrogant can you get?
      • False comparison... if you want to compare apples to apples, you should really be comparing Fedora to Sid (Debian Unstable).

        Contrary to popular opinion, Debian Unstable is very, very stable. I'd like stable to release more often, but look at what we get in return: more packages, more architectures, and more freedom.

        -- John.
    • I disagree. Redhat make their money from support and the support of the code - all the code is released under GPL, and you can download it.

      I think they are gearing up to become a fully supportive company for businesses - where you can't afford to produce mainline code that isn't up to scratch - and let the Fedora code (their off-spring) take it's first tentative steps away from the nest.

    • Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Erwos (553607) on Friday June 03 2005, @01:13PM (#12716219)
      "This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat."

      Your conspiracy theory is contradicted by, well, everything.

      Red Hat bought Netscape Directory Server. They promptly released it as Free software.

      They had the cluster file system. They released it as Free software.

      RHEL3 and RHEL4 are _all_ Free software. Not some - all.

      Sorry, but there is still a very strong Free software sentiment going on over there, and you only need to read the blogs of the employees to find it out. They don't sell anything proprietary, unless you count RHN (which isn't distributed per se anyways).

      If you want to convince people, try presenting, I don't know, a coherent argument with some sort of evidence. "I think" is pretty crappy proof.

      -Erwos
    • > They will eventually turn as many components of their so-called
      > Enterprise version of Linux into closed source, proprietary software,
      > in the same style as most of the UNIX OSes out there.

      Common conspiracy theory, but almost certainly wrong. Where do you think they GET their Enterprise distro? Fedora. RHEL4 is basically FC3 cleaned up and polished a bit more. They know they lack the resources to fully test enterprise software inhouse so they depend on Fedora for wide testing of all new tech

    • You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base by EOL'ing Red Hat Linux 9 and decided not to release another desktop version for the masses.

      When they first announced Fedora, that was sort of my take on it. I was unhappy about it, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. In my opinion time has shown that they have done exactly what they said, and not screwed anyone. The Fedore Core distributions have had the same degree of quality I had come to expect of the RHL d

    • I wonder what will happen to Fedora legacy support with RH out of the picture?
      Why would it be any different? Fedora legacy support has never been done by Red Hat.

      And it's inaccurate to claim that RH will be out of the picture.

    • Heh. Maybe you're thinking of Fedora Extras, which never really was "split off" but was always separate. It was recently moved from the old fedora.us project to a RedHat-controlled server.

      But, even if you're not, I wouldn't be suprised. RedHat is the most schizophrenic company ever to have existed. Look at their various experimental offerings in Linux support over the past ten years. Just as one of them starts gaining traction, it's killed off and replaced with a completely different business model.

      I
    • What are you saying? Fedora was never meant to be a money maker for Red Hat. On the contrary, Fedora was meant to be a place for Red Hat to pour valuable resources into; research, more or less, in the hope that it might in some indirect way benefit their Enterprise Linuxes. Red Hat has been clear about this intention from day one, so there is no "services model" that has failed or anything else.

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