Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open? 216
Chillybott writes "CNET reports that Red Hat is trying to bolster more support for the Fedora project by giving the users more control over and input into the development process. The article states that they have made their CVS repositories visible and hints that soon members of the Fedora community will be able to act as distribution maintainers.
Seems like a good idea to me, although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired."
I am just confused (Score:5, Insightful)
The next day redhat wants to put all the best resources in rescuing RH Fedora.
Life was just better when there was a universally superior redhat 9. We could have successfully been at redhat 10 by now.
Here's some pointers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gentoo (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when was the purpose of Linux to gain market share?
I was under the impression that Linux is just a free/open alternative to commercial operating systems. Nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Here's some pointers (Score:3, Insightful)
Launch your preferred shell, then
Is it really so hard ?
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be hard to find two projects with such radically different goals.
Red Hat's goal is stability. 2 years with out a reboot kind of stable. Gentoo is about staying current, and fast execution.
I don't user either Distro. But I'd hate to see them ruin both distros by merging them for the sake of merging.
LK
Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally, but timely? (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, for folks creating their own internal RPM's for packages (for a long time php-devel was not packaged for example), the idea of being able to mainline packages was very appealing, and similar to other open projects (gentoo though debian etc).
But going to the site, nothing like this was there. Pretty dissapointing. In other words, it was existing bug reporting every distro and many commercial packages have plus some marketing (this omits other things that were offered, but was my feeling at the time).
Finally, it looks like they will be making some efforts to really create an enviroment folks are able to contribute in. A shame they weren't able to harness the initial energy and interest, but these are the right types of moves, though coming a little late perhaps.
Also useful to note that a fair number of places showed up filling in gaps in redhat's offering. Freshrpms and friends come to mind for example. But with some more creativity I think redhat could have really put together something exciting.
Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
apt-get vs rpm vs emerge vs others, different installers and so on.
Why spread so many developer resources for similar projects?! Do we really need twenty different IRC clients or ICQ clones?!
About time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Even Linux companies (Score:4, Insightful)
I know I have switched to SuSE for desktops now, and am still clinging to RH for servers, but am likely to start working with Deb or SuSE in the future, since if I am going to have a different distro on the server than on the desktop, I might as well real-world test some other toys.
I realize this is just guys like me working small shops, but I really think that by abandoning the RHL line, RH caused a group of low- to mid-level techs to start considering other options, when RH had been our default. If Fedora's QC had been there from the start, this might not have happened, but a series of small bugs, including not dual boot installing cleanely from the default installer, ran some of us off. These problems are probably fixed now, but the damage is done. I know I won't go back to Fedora, because I don't trust their QC process.
docs (Score:4, Insightful)
It says that to build a RPM you run the following command: "rpm -ba foobar-1.0.spec" which hasn't worked for years. Look for yourself here [rpm.org]
If you want people to help out you should update the doc! There are so many edge cases and hidden options it is insane and any new developers will pull there hair out. Not only that, but put the documentation in the cvs so everyone can help update it.
For something as critical as RPM Red Hat should be ashamed that their developer documentation is so bad.
-Benjamin Meyer
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
These aren't wheels. They're NOT interchangable.
You're whining about a problem that doesn't exist. How about we send you to China to administer a school full of 486s with 4MB of RAM each and gentoo. Lets see how long you last with emerge until your head fries from watching shit compile.
That is, if you can even get gentoo started. You'll probably need debian's sleek and, well, skimpy installer to get it started on a machine with 4MB.
Or what if its not a PC at all? Debian's installer runs on what... 8? 12 platforms? I've lost count.
Or, if you're clueless or just need everything detected for you because you can't tell your video card from your monitor model, you want a redhat or mandrake install that supports a few architectures, but has automatic hardware detection, and so on.
Completely different target markets here.
Re:Gentoo (Score:3, Insightful)
Those people are doing what they do because they want to. No PHBs involved. If you could tell them to work on something else, they'd probably just stop working.
These ``developer resources'' aren't a limited number of corporate code monkeys, they are folks who are volunteering to do something they want to do. Because everyone is self-assigned, ``we'' have exactly enough people to do what is being done, and not nearly enough people to follow anyone's grand scheme, even if that grand scheme took far fewer ``developer resources''.
That's the strength and weakness of libre, collaberative development. Each person does whatever he wants to, and if that means three hundred thousand people are writing a new grep or a new apt-get at any given moment, well, that's not wasted effort. It makes them happy, and that's reason enough. When someone (like maybe you) suggests that something else should be making them happy, it shows a profound misunderstanding of how ``developer resources'' get allocated outside the corporation.
My point is that if you were to try to choke off development of all those competing projects, you would not only lose the benefit of the competition, but you would find that most of the people who you thought would be working on your favorite project are instead doing something else with their free time, like surfing pr0n or seeing their girlfriends. You might even wind up with fewer ``developer resources'' working on your favorite!
Finally, the libre licensing means that a really good idea which shows up in any of the competing projects can and probably will wind up in all of them.
Re:Here's some pointers (Score:2, Insightful)
Really intuative...
Re:Even Linux companies (Score:5, Insightful)
How does letting Joe Smoe and his small business run RHEL without the support take focus from the server market? Redhat doesn't have to exclude people who can't afford their support from running their distribution. They could just not support you unless you purchase support, and let you run their stable product.
The fact is, they have excluded people from their stable product, people who in fact helped them gain their marketshare. Maybe their new business model is better for everyone, but I think perhaps Redhat may be 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg' by essentially excluding the very people who helped pushed them to the top of the Linux distro ladder. Redhat did very little in the way of advertising (probably due to lack of cash), most of their early advertising was word of mouth. "Hey, use this, it's free, and if you want support, you can buy some." They owe much of their success to developer and user acceptance of their earlier products.
Redhat has made some great contributions, and they continue do to so, and we have to commend them for this, however, Redhat has led me to the conclusion that if you want to run a free Linux that is socially stable (ie doesn't change their product and offerings every time they get a new CEO), you have to run one that is non-profit. Debian and Ubuntu are good examples of non-profit Linuxes that probably won't be offering you any negative suprises in the next year.
Yes, they have to make money to survive, but there appears to be a fine line between making money off of free software and alienating the community. I'm thinking Redhat is trying to get back to the center of this line, though I am personally hoping that something like Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] becomes the new community darling, and Redhat becomes a niche player for the wealthiest of companies.
Note: I migrated my users and servers from SunOS and Digital Unix to Redhat about 5 years ago, and migrated servers from Redhat 9 to Debian Woody about 2 years ago, and am currently in the market for a Desktop Linux replacment for Fedora.
Re:Even Linux companies (Score:3, Insightful)
Bang, hammer hits nail on head. When Redhat started the whole Fedora thing, they left the small/middle tier folks without an option. It was either spend the big bucks for Enterprise or roll the dice on Fedora. They didn't seem to realize that a lot of grassroots support depended on that small/middle tier.
Yeah yeah, they're running a business (and I'm a share holder, so what) but rule one of business would be don't piss off your customers unless you can afford to lose them. I think they undervalued what the grassroot support was worth. Novell seems to understand this, perhaps, but it could also be they are trying to see if they can bleed Redhat out of the market before upping their price for their distro. Time will tell.
Re:Gentoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditching RH Desktop was a dumb move. (Score:3, Insightful)
Redhat got to the height it did because of one thing, namely mindshare. Today the people I know who need to use linux for business normally use Redhat. Why? Because other business products are certified against it.
But while RH retains that gravity, it's loosing it's momentum simply because it is loosing mindshare. Why? My guess is that they've diluted things with this Fedora Project. It's not "RedHat" per se any more.
So they've closed the door on those coming in from the ground floor. And what happens? Other distributions spring up. I started using redhat at version 2.2 back with kernel 1.2.13 but I've now tried other ways of doing things - non RPM based distributions and I'm telling you I wouldn't go back. Gone are the days I need to go culling through freshrpms for some PACKAGE-connectiva.i386.rpm substitute for RPM Hell. Things are happy here now.
The reason behind the naming (Score:3, Insightful)
* Fedora is a logical sucessor to Red Hat Linux. New Open Source technology regularly (well, actually more regularly) perhaps at the expense of app compatibility - ie, like when you upgraded to NPTL from Linuxthreads in Red Hat 8 and had to upgrade your JRE.
* The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about? Complaining that you didn't read the release announcement for Red Hat 9, which mentioned the support period?
Red Hat staff spend their says working on Fedora. In fact, Fedora is the thing that's maintained over time. It has its own beta cycle. Report a bug and a Red Hat staff member will fix it. RHEL is forked from it every so often.
If you want RHEL, but don't want to buy support, get Whitebox. You pay $0 to use the software. You pay money, however, to get unlimited support calls to Red Hat every year. Try that with Sun, Microsoft, or most other Linux distros.
Why does Red Hat cop so much crap when we've been about as Evil as Google (what about Suse pushing proprietary software for so long)?
Oh wait, cause we have more business market share than every other Linux distro combined. Red Hat, despite its merits, is That Distro They Make You Use At Work.
Oh, yeah, and some dickead tried Red Hat circa 1998, noted the dependency resolution, and doesn't understand the concept of software improving over time.
Idiots.
Fedora was a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
So the high end stuff is going to get copied about 8 minutes after its released. And completely free, stable, excellent linux distributions like ubuntu, gentoo, debian, et al, are available that are not meant to be some sort of farm team for the real distribution. How did it not occur to the powers that be at Redhat that their base would drift away to other distributions?
Take myself. I've used Redhat since v5.2, but I'm switching to ubuntu. It's so fast, so stable, it's free, there's a great upgrade path, etc. What do I need Redhat/Fedora for?