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.'"

Fedora Responds

The fedora-devel-list [redhat.com] has already responded to this, as well as Alan Cox [reddit.com] himself.

Personally, I'd like to see ESR's response to these rebuffs.

Re:Fedora Responds

Yeah, and two replies deep -- after one anti-socialist rant -- gets you to this:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/ 2007-February/msg01083.html [redhat.com]

That is a telling thread and validates part of what Eric is saying:

"After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my
limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me
into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which
an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system
unusable."

Flat out, that should have never been allowed to happen. The fact that it can, and did, highlights what is a fundamental problem with package management on Fedora/Red Hat.

Re:Fedora Responds

He used --force or --nodeps when removing that package. It tried to stop him and he overrode it.

  Better disable 'cat' since it can be used to erase your hard drive!

Re:Fedora Responds

He used --force or --nodeps when removing that package. It tried to stop him and he overrode it. Better disable 'cat' since it can be used to erase your hard drive!

If the system leaves you no choice but to override it because it is doing something wrong, and YOU do something wrong, who is at fault? Answer: everyone.

The system is fucking stupid because it still leaves you in dependency hell. I don't really know how people can find the stomach to dispute that. It's like when some program bluescreens windows and people make excuses for it. "Well the program did such and such"... fuck you! No program should ever be able to crash any OS. Mind you, there are ways to panic Linux, as well. I just like to bring up the BSOD whenever possible, since we see it so often, or would if XP didn't default to immediate reboot. And sometimes even then the system crashes so hard it can't reboot itself anyway.

If the system is so broken that it forces the user to do unsupported things, the system needs replacing whether the user is culpable or not.

Re:Fedora Responds

I agree. The absolute decay of the Fedora package repositories and the total and utter stagnation of RPM were my two biggest reasons from moving away from Fedora Core to Ubuntu. I should never have to chase down dependencies -- ever. Especially not for a package that is considered core to the GNOME desktop. Maybe apt and the Ubuntu/Debian package repositories have me absolutely spoiled, but then again, how is Linux ever going to gain desktop marketshare with attitudes like: "Oh, well, just add this switch to your yum command-line to add the updates-testing repository to your update command and that'll work around the problem." The system should make life easy for me.

I don't have a computer so I can go around chasing problems all the time.I need to do real work, and the package system is the LAST thing that should get in my way.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is perfect by any stretch. But in the two years I've been using it, I've only seen one update that caused any problems at all and the mailing lists were filled with "don't update package so-and-so because it is broken" the day the bad package was released, a workaround for those who did get the update was posted just after that, and a fixed package was ready by the next morning. I'm just not seeing that level of response out of the Fedora camp.

Re:Fedora Responds

Most commercial programs do it this way, it is by far the easiest way for non-free applications. But remember, it is not just HD and bandwidth... it's also RAM and disk cache. Not to mention, when a security bug is found in libxyz, it is going to be really fun upgrading all those packages that includes libxyz.

All in all, I do not think that static linking is a good approach, except maybe for a few "emergency" class packages.

Re:Fedora Responds

No.

If I was, it would be "Bandwidth is sheep".

no argument from here

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)

Re:Fedora Responds

Using a dependency resolver like Apt or Yum, I've never suffered dependency hell. Because I'm not retarded enough to add 40 different repos with incompatible builds of the same packages. You pick a set of repos that are intended to work with each other, or you go straight to the owner of the software being package and build your own (or in the event of proprietary software you ask them to provide a build for your distribution). What was the one package he wanted to ugprade? What repo provided it? Why did he use --force and/or --nodeps?

Re:Fedora Responds

But it's not the fault of Fedora or Ubuntu if two different people setup their own public repository with incompatible versions of packages not in the core repo. It's not even the fault of the individual repo maintainers, because they build all their own packages compatible with the base and with themselves. It's the fault of the user for not being aware of what they're installing. That problem exists on any platform. How many people do you see with Windows boxes laoded with spyware/adware and an inability to play a handful of avi file because they installed 3 different kazaavideocodec packages that were incompatible? It sure was easy to install but not much more usable (in my experience). That's not the fault of Microsoft. I've had the same thing happen on my Mac. It wasn't Apple's fault, it was my fault for installing too much incompatible 3rd party stuff.

There was an effort put forth, last time I used Fedora Core, for the most popular 3rd party repo maintainers to standardize how the built packages and how they versioned their packages, so that the repos would be compatible. But it didn't entirely work, because one of them didn't want to join the club. If memory serves, that lone standout was Livna, which I think somewhat/halfway became Fedora Extras (haven't used Fedora since FC3 I think, might have tried 4). The only thing Fedora can do is maintain a list of 3rd party repo maintainers who are certified compatible with each other on a particular release. Beyond that it's up to the user. Just like on Windows and Mac.

The issue of repos is more visible in Linux because more often than not people on Mac and Windows get extra software direct from the software provider. If you need divx you got to divx.com. If you need The only real exception I can think of is people who are heavy into p2p and get media codec/player packs from their favorite p2p sites. On Linux the model is usually add repo X, install package Y.

Re:Fedora Responds

The system is fucking stupid because it still leaves you in dependency hell. I don't really know how people can find the stomach to dispute that. It's like when some program bluescreens windows and people make excuses for it. "Well the program did such and such"... fuck you!

Know what I like about you, Martin? We can never tell what you're really thinking. You bear the inscrutability of the Orient, the stolid face of The Gambler. Very few will ever discern your true feelings from the subtle hints you leave behind.

Re:Fedora Responds

Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.

It's a little like someone thinking that the way to change the root password is to vi /etc/passwd and insert "secret123" in the second column. By the time they're realized they're not the expert they thought they were, it's too late. And the real answer was to use the "passwd" tool. Why did they do it? Maybe there was a bug in the OS. Perhaps "passwd" didn't work, and so they edited /etc/passwd instead. But why the hell would they edit it? Why not report the problem and let someone who knows what the actual issue is get them the fix?

Alan Cox actually does a reasonable job of explaining why ESR has, essentially, blamed the wrong people for this here [redhat.com]. There was a problem. Instead of ESR asking for help, he blindly used the sledgehammer to try to fix the issue himself, despite not knowing what the problem was and what the consequences would be of him using the sledgehammer.

Realistically, I don't think this has anything to do with ESR having a package management meltdown. On some level I suspect ESR knows full well that an ordinary user would never have pulled the same stunt he did, and that he bears the consequences for screwing with something he really didn't know enough about. I think this has to do with being frustrated and "out of love" with Fedora, in much the same way as marriages often break apart supposedly because He never passes the sugar, or She never makes the tea. Ubuntu? Well, of course, it's different, it's popular, and it's populist.

I just don't see the need for press attention over it, or the drama queen act.

Re:Fedora Responds

I would just point out that Alan Cox's statement is the exact reason Fedora has been loosing seats to Ubuntu as rapidly as possible. Never mind that that he ignores all real problems that led me to leave Feodora for Ubuntu, he focuses on the multimedia codecs issue, and issues a screed against open source. That arrogance is what led Fedora to it's current shrinking place in the world.

Re:Fedora Responds

I would just point out that Alan Cox's statement is the exact reason Fedora has been loosing [sic] seats to Ubuntu as rapidly as possible

Well, I wouldn't say that's the exact reason... I've noticed on several OSS support forums that Fedora seems to be one of the most problematic distros. People have problems installing stuff, configuring stuff, things hang or eat tons of CPU time, and just generally don't work properly. And, while I've never see anyone come right out and say "You need to move to another distro", lots of times the threads will end with "I see on the project bug list that this is a known problem with Fedora Core"...

So I don't think any mass exodus is solely based on political ideals...

Re:Fedora Responds

Nope.

Stuff like Mepis and Ubuntu are handed out freely and frequently in places where there's a physical Linux USER population. Not only would I expect the non-Fedora distributions to have more users, I would expect them to have more of the LESS experienced users expecting that old style "smooth Redhat Desktop experience".

This really is non-news.

ESR after all of this time finally realized that he as an end user might actually want to use a distribution that is NOT BETA or is for END USERS. The mind boggles.

Beat the stuffing out of that straw man!

The win is, add one or two lines to your yum.conf, or if you prefer to your apt-sources list, and the problem disappears entirely under Redhat or Fedora, easily, cleanly, and without sending you into dependency hell. This RPM bashing is a real straw man. The end user package management systems used on Redhat and Fedora are yum and apt, *not* rpm. Sure you can dive into low level package management and use RPM directly - and you can even screw up your system. You can go one better and use tar or rm directly - and screw up your system even faster (if you don't know what you're doing).

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!

Noob alert

(not you, the parent poster).

Reading Eric's message, did anyone get CHILLS down their spine? ...at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."

ACTUALLY, it was using --force that rendered the system unusable. It's called a SAFETY mechanism.

Quick... someone give this man a nail gun, and show him how 'limiting' it is that the nailgun has to make contact with wood before firing. Someday, we'll read about how ESR dropped something out his car door, reach for it without using PARK, and then we'll hear about how his CAR rendered his shooting finger "unusable". It's always someone else's fault Eric.

There used to be a name for users like this on IRC. I remember seeing new Debian users who install Debian stable, then wontonly mix in Debian Unstable and nightly. The next time they did an apt-get update, this class of user would demand to know why "apt broke my system".

This guy is a poster child for why conservative managers stick with Windows. It's been YEARS since he wrote anything that was genuinely useful and NOT designed to get a headline ('zork' style kernel config manus, anyone?). Did anyone else get a laugh on at the Fedora list quote, how 2006 New Years Resolution was to help the Fedora package folks? Gee it's 2007 now.

Every word or letter from him is blatent self promootion, and should be viewed with the same skepticism reserved for Paul Therriot and their kind. Right now it appears Ubuntu is becoming more popular than Fedora (or at least there's that PERCEPTION), and this alone is ESR's motive for switching.

Re:Noob alert

Wish I had some moderator points to push parent up.

I don't think I'd be quite as hard on ESR as you are -- I still like some of his classics -- but you're right about his tirades, and more recently about his self-serving editorials. He's likely to latch on to any little thing he doesn't like in a system and go on and on about it like it's the end of the world. There's not a package management tool in the universe that will completely get you around all the complexities of maintaining a system, especially if all the package creators aren't really careful. Do you remember him going on and on about CUPS? Now, I hate CUPS too, but he went absolutely ballistic, about calling it one of the worst software packages in the history of the industry.

I think he's more interested in headlines than he is about shedding light on the subject. He's long been at odds with the more purist philosophies of people like Cox and RMS, and has made no attempt to hide his beliefs that Free and Proprietary should "learn to get along with each other."

I think he's just looking for a reason to bash Red Hat's "Pure Free Software" stance.

Re:s/Fedors/ESR/

I really don't care who that person is, or who he was. I will judge his arguments based on the arguments only. Even if he is Lucifer himself, that doesn't make his arguments any less or more valid. Learn to avoid ad-hominen attacks, learn to argue the issue and not hte person. That's the only way to get some value from the clash of opinions.

Re:s/Fedors/ESR/

But his two main arguments are not valid:

1. He stated that his system got trashed because of what he did and said that it is Fedora fault. And nothing else. He didnt tell what he did exactly. So you can or cannot belive him. But he has not given any details. He said something like "I did something and then my system crashed". But he did'nt specify if he did "rm / -rf" or "apt get update kernel". So this argument is shallow.

2. He stated some retarded stuff about Fedora not including WMF support. First of all I think he mistook WMF with Windows Media. Secondly he stated that Ubuntu provides support for given WMF and Fedora doesn't. Either Fedora and Ubuntu support WMF. Either Fedora and Ubundtu do not support Windows Media.

So he *is* basically stupid because all he said is plain false.

Re:Fedora Responds

I think Alan Cox's comment pretty much validated what ESR said, so for ESR to respond would be redundant.

ESR said he wants an OS that does what he wants it to do, rather than doing things according to a moral code. Cox said he wants an OS to do things according to a moral code, even if it means he's not able to do some things you want to do.

They agree that they disagree. What more is there to say?

Re:Fedora Responds

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...

Disappointed

LWN ran this a day or two ago, and their headline was ESR's Farewell Letter. I had such great expectations for a moment, until I read the article :-)

Re:Disappointed

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 [wikipedia.org]. 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)

Why make a stink?

Can't a prominent OSS person just switch anymore? It seems like they have to make a big political stink out of it. It's really too bad that people can't leave when things are still amicable, and instead they let it boil over to a traditional email flame-fest by the time they act.

Re:Why make a stink?

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.

Re:Why make a stink?

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 [desktoplinux.com]. Freespire is Linspire, a company which just signed a deal with Ubuntu [desktoplinux.com]. 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.

Re:Why make a stink?

Can't a prominent OSS person just switch anymore?

Exactly. And for that matter, why the hell should Linus care what DE I ( and a great deal of people ) like to use? Just because Linus likes KDE doesn't mean Gnome is a POS.

Still, I have to agree with Raymond - you are almost forced to use third party repositories like freshrpms or dag because the repositories just plain suck.

Then you get stuck in dependency hell because one site doesn't necessarily use the same package names as the other.

And where the hell is Firefox 2 for Fedora anyway? They decided that we don't need it and they're going to hold out for Firefox 3? What the hell's that all about anyway?

I think he's absolutely right

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.

Re:I think he's absolutely right

It becomes a problem when the goal of Fedora is to use Free Software. Cox et al. give a damn about making it easy for people to make derivative distros. Would you fault Debian for being the same way? They're even worse than Fedora when it comes to non-free software.

Fedora has a goal of making it easy to distribute derivatives, just as ESR has different goals of functionality at the expense of freedom. Neither is wrong or right, just different.

Yay community

It's always interesting to observe the reaction of the people who supposedly make up the "open source community" when these things happen. On the original article and on the OSNews post as well the general attitude is the same that I saw when ESR dared criticize the CUPS GUI - he's a "fucking idiot", essentially.

While I am normally amused a