Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora 548
loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.
Rawhide (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Questions for Red Hat customers... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyhow, some questions to you Red Hat customers...
When Red Hat started Fedora and then switched its major focus to the enterprise, how many of you stayed loyal to Red Hat, and how many of you went to another distro?
And, of those that left, how many of you are willing to embrace the return of the prodigal son?
Re:Questions for Red Hat customers... (Score:1, Interesting)
So when Redhat announced Fedora I looked it over and made the switch.
Do I have complaints with Fedora? Yes.
Still the 6 month release schedule with emphasis on innovation beats debians emphasis on political bickering and outdatedness.
Not a production OS (Score:3, Interesting)
Debian, on the other hand, is excellent, stable, widely supported Linux disro that most people use to run production systems.
We migrated from RH to Debian a while ago and are very happy with change.
Penitence? (Score:1, Interesting)
See http://www.centos.org/
for details if you're interested. Though I believe they may have taken the article down under threat of retaliation from Redhat's lawyers.
Cheers,
Re:Too little too late? I've only a RH machine lef (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a shame really. I happily paid for the RHE download. I used redhat for seven years and I think they deserve some support. They are focusing on their corporate customers, and that is where they should go if it keeps them in business. They still support many free software developers and give back to the community.
The only things we have running redhat at school are some rack systems that are behind a firewall. I still have it installed on my desktop at home, but that computer is being replaced by my new powerbook. I still like them as a company, I'm just no longer their target audience.
Already Screwed the Pooch (Score:2, Interesting)
Although I can only speak from personal experience, I've heard a lot of other people echo my sentiments.
I used redhat almost exclusively since somewhere around version 4. I used redhat up until the end (though I stuck with 7.3 and never upgraded to 8 or 9, and I think 8 signaled the beginning of the end). I bought basically ever release, and always recommended RedHat about any other distribution, because it was the distribution I knew best.
When redhat basically abandon their customers, and with the negative things I heard about Fedora, I started looking around for another distribution.
Eventually I switched over to Suse, which is IMHO a much better distribution than RedHat ever thought about being. Now, my money goes to Suse (well, I guess to novell now), when people ask about a distribution, I recommend Suse, and whenever I'm working with a company trying to decide what to run on their servers, I recommend Suse. (Of course, I've heard some nasty things about 9.2, so I'm going to wait around with 9.1 and see if things get better with 9.3, or switch to another distro, probably gentoo).
The thing is, as much as redhat wants Linux to be enterprise driven, it's still the geeks that seem to have a lot of influence in the tides of Linux.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, cause none of us stupid max users have asked for a two button mouse out of the box or the ability to resize a windows from ANY side!
I just love having to install 4 or 5 utilities just to get base functionality that we have been asking for SINCE 6.0!
Jorgie
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:3, Interesting)
path to take when we absolutely need to go to a 2.6 distro. Fedora
was seen as a take-away when it came out and I don't see that
situation changing in any real way. They should give back what they
took away, that is, a free-as-in-beer distro that represents the best
of what Red Hat and the community process has to offer. Either do
that or walk away.
Don't treat us like we're stupid. We spend a lot of time getting used
to the "flavor" of a distro and you can't just change all that around
and expect us to take it. We want the old Red Hat back. We want an
RH10 distro or something very close to it.
Of course I am not holding my breath.
Re:FUD? (Score:2, Interesting)
So let me just say that I think a better word to use would be sardonic rather than ironic.
And also to note that irony is best defined as a poignant contrast between expectations or intentions with the actual outcome. The poignant part's the important thing.
Although that doesn't include Socratic irony, but that's an entirely different meaning and it's fading from modern English.
Ease of use in Fedora is good and getting better (Score:2, Interesting)
So Redhat made a mistake and abandoned some users. Big deal it is just another company people! The new direction Redhat is taking with Fedora is a nice step at admitting they made an error and are willing to work with the community to fix it.
Next time you are in a large bookstore like Barnes'n Noble take a look at the unix section. Fedora Redhat books take up a whole shelf to themselves now. Yes, Fedora is that popular now. It works, it is easy to use, you don't have to wait 2 days while it compiles.
The Yum command line RPM dependency updater works great in FC3 and FC4. FC4 is going to rock. Just wait and see.
Re:Ease of use in Fedora is good and getting bette (Score:1, Interesting)
Redhat lost opensource developer support... (Score:5, Interesting)
They co-opted the fedora project,gave it ver little resources and virtually *NO* promotion, and tried to downplay it's even existence to all the corporate customers that they are pitching yearly per-server RHN contracts to.
People who had used SuSE before went back and tried SuSE and discovered that SuSE had newer software versions than Redhat
People who might have thought that Debian was only for masochists discovered Ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] and decided it was fast, easy, and didn't become "legacy" in 12 months
People who wanted more updated packages and hated breaking RPM dependencies and like to occasionally build things from source or optomize their packages found Gentoo [gentoo.org] and decided that rebuilding their entire OS could be fun, easy, and that their OS didn't need to become Legacy in 12 months.
Personally, I think that Gentoo is probably the purest Linux distribution, and that if you want the stability of a tried and true distribution that Ubuntu is the best Debian I've seen.
More developers have shifted away from Redhat, and they in turn have been influencing many other people's choice of distribution, and ultimately they are losing mindshare.
I think Redhat has finally realized that they *need* those developers and they're now doing a strange dance to try to pump up Fedora enough to excite the development community, but not enough to dissuade corpoprate customers for paying them for access to patches for RHEL.
"Hey everyone (except corporate customers), look Fedora's great!"
"Hey everyone (except developers), Fedora's unstable and unsupported, use RHEL!"
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Redhat & Fedora (Score:4, Interesting)
When Fedora.US first launched, and then was subsumed into Redhat, a lot of user submitted files and extras just seemed to disappear.
Dags [wieers.com] and Freshrpms [freshrpms.net] were probably the best place to get the stuff RH didn't supply for Fedora, but even though they're interoperable, I wouldn't say either of them are community driven.
Ubuntu is the first distro that's kept me from coming back to Fedora. From ease of use, it's just as good, if not better, than Fedora. It just seems to do so many small things that Fedora wanted to do, but didn't. Ubuntu ships on one CD, has the power of APT (don't get me started on Yum, and I used APT for years on Fedora / RH w/Freshrpms), and Ubuntu has that community feel to it, even if it is a millionaire funding 'em.
Sorry Red Hat, you came close for many years, but in the end, close wasn't good enough.
What I want: More packages (Score:1, Interesting)
- mp3 player for XMMS. Reason not included: The whole patent issue.
- lame mp3 encoder. Reason not included: Same patent issue.
- FVWM 1 window manager. Reason not included: Old window manager; most people use newer ones.
- Xdaliclock. Reason not included: Old cutesy clock for X; KDE/GNOME/Xfce have built-in clocks.
- The xv image viewer. Reason not included: Not open source software (source included, but "free for personal use only" license); however I did buy a license for this program ten years ago.
Now, some of these packages are ones that RedHat can't comfortable include. Others are. However, having them in an official form instead of having to scour the net and my old CD-Rs after installing Fedora would be nice.Re:While we're fantasizing ... (Score:1, Interesting)
With yum or apt for Fedora, shouldn't they just have it all on one CD and allow the user or admin install aps later? Makes more sense and allows admins/users to decrease the amount of plastic/aluminium.
Re:Questions for Red Hat customers... (Score:1, Interesting)
Redhat Fedora Rant (Score:3, Interesting)
RHEL4 has come out, and guess what, they 'recommentd' you re-install, you can upgrade, but it will probably break so re-install and be happy.
WTF!!!, Hey those thousands of dollars you get paid for support should go towards engineers managing things like config file changes (even if its just a these apps have changed configs, your changes have been migrated but please check).
We run Oracle 10g RAC, how in a live production environment am I meant to re-install RHEL4 and then RAC and everything else we run.
It's an absolute joke (Hint to redhat that 'ENTERPRISE' word in the product means you take care of issues like this).
Makes me nostaligic for the days of AIX 4.1 to 4.3.3 upgrades where stuff just worked.
Majorly pissed!!!
Re:No supported upgrade path... (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought one year of subscription update service for RH8 for my machines, not because I had to but it was convenient and back then I didn't mind sending a little money Red Hat's way to support them.
Of course they proceeded to end of life Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 within the space of a few months and the remainder of my subscription was essentially worthless and there was no good upgrade path other than pay an arm and a leg for Enterprise or risk Fedora and Fedora struck me as strategicly chaotic(i.e. whose in charge there?). There was zero chance of me paying them more money for enterprise after they'd just screwed me on my old subscription.
I had a long flame fest hear with a Red Hat employee whose login is Nailer last time Fudcon was posted on Slashdot.
One of his suggestions was I should have contacted Red Hat and expressed my displeasure and since I didn't I had no right to bitch. Well its always a customers right to bith, I also told him that was obviously pointless to complaint to Red Hat since it was a strategic decision on Red Hat's part to ax their loyal customer base, those who got them where they were, to focus on charging an arm and a leg for Enterprise support to big corporations and to maximize their profit margin. Since they IPO'ed its pretty obvious they started caring more for what Wall Street analysts think than loyal customers and the developer community.
Nailer also suggested I should go begging to Red Hat Marketing/Sales and maybe they would give me a deal on an Enterprise upgrade, well again there is zero chance of me rewarding Red Hat with more money after they'd just unilaterally stuck a knife in my current subscription and forced me to abandon my current setup.
Nailer also gave me this never ending speil about how the Enterprise and Fedora marketing strategy made perfect sense and it was my problem for not seeing the wisdom in it. Feh!
Needless to say I just voted with my feet and migrated everything to Gentoo and never looked back. I wouldn't use Red Hat now if it was the last distribution on earth. Turns out I prefer compiling from source with Gentoo versus the old RPM mess anyway.
When Red Hat execs got rich on their IPO and slaved themselves to Wall Street they lost track of something really basic, yes they need to be profitable but they benefited mightily from open source developers and their original customer base and they made their IPO possible in the first place. Pissing off your user and developer community, and selling them out in favor of Wall Street analysts is an especially stupid strategy in the Linux world.
Red Hat completely trashed their brand and the loyalty they had for their distribution. They should have fine tuned out the problems in their strategy instead of introducing a huge discontinuity which pushed loyal customers to bailing on them.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:3, Interesting)
While RedHat has been focused on their RHEL products, to the detriment of their (formerly loyal desktop user base), time has marched on. The RH/Fedora releases have been (shall we say?)
problematic, with buggy installations and limited upgrade paths (excepting full installs). I no
longer use any RedHat desktop OS. There are other linux desktop distributions to compete with RedHat, and their absence from this market has left the door wide open for the competition. One of the things that bothers me about RedHat's marketing "prowness" is just when will they pull the support out from under their current desktop users?
My problem with RedHat's desktop support got me to looking at other linux distributions, including server distributions. And once the "trust threshhold" has been broken, alternative solutions become apparent. I know what the difference between a Microsoft client OS and a Microsoft server OS is - primarily Client Licenses. And I know what the difference between a SCO client OS and a SCO server OS is - limiting client access.
The differentiation for linux is more vague - which services are installed, how the kernel and i/o are tweeked, etc. Any linux distribution that readily permits the installation of a generic kernel, eases installation of applications from source, and can install without the GUI becomes a fair replacement for that expensive RHEL license and support contract.
And for those who do need a support contract for
their server and desktop needs, there is (thankfully) a viable alternative in Novell/SUSE.
RedHat's marketing "gurus" have (IMHO) shot themselves in the foot.
Re: No supported upgrade path... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yea, I'm still a little afraid of doing network upgrades on production servers. Of course, I'm scared of ANY upgrades on production servers.
I'm currently nursing a RedHat 8 box along, custom building security fix packages as I need to. Once I get a little time I plan on upgrading it, but a little rework needs to be done on a few apps that run on it before that can happen.
No plans to change upgrade proceedure? (Score:4, Interesting)
-put in the new CD
-boot to CD
-run installer in upgrade mode
That totally screws those of us with headless servers in datacenter. Someone will reply that you can use yum/apt-get and just update your sources, but I was told SPECIFICALLY not to do that BY FEDORA DEVELOPERS. I was informed that going from FC1 to 2 via apt or yum WOULD break things, and that my only option was to go onto fedora-legacy once FC1 was phazed out.
Nice one, jerks.
See this thread for details:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Currently I'm running Fedora Core 3 with Gnome and the whole thing just works so nicely out of the box. The little up2date tick in the system tray makes keeping up to date and patched a breeze, and to make things even easier I also have apt-rpm installed - this makes installing mp3 media players and stuff like that a breeze.
I also use this box for firmware development for AVR microcontrollers and it certainally works fine as a workstation.
If you've learn't your linux ropes and you keen to go back to a low maintenance distro, or if you want a hassle free linux, Fedora Core 3 certainally takes some beating.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Redhat lost community goodwill (Score:5, Interesting)
Seth, you're a good guy. And indeed, all the RH engineers I know are good guys. RH spends an inordinate amount of money on the community, and has been a real focal point for the spread of Linux.
The problem is that several years after the avoidable screwup of claiming "we're walking away from home users and the desktop: go use Windows", I still can't walk into a random computer store, as far as I know, and buy a $20 boxed DVD with any kind of Red Hat Linux on it. This is bad. I can certainly walk into any computer store and buy a copy of Windows. One of the things that made us loyal to Red Hat (and I sysadmined a network of RH boxes for many years) was that we could always get the latest "supported" bits at the corner store without any download hassle---more importantly, we could always recommend the latest bits to newbies without any download hassle.
None of this is the engineers' fault. But it still sends a message to those, like me, who are trying to figure out what Linux distro to use, and that message is "we don't care about you unless you're either rich or have skills we can leverage." The cost of the boxed DVD should be trivial by comparison to the opportunity costs of sending this message, but RH management doesn't seem to see it. That in turn means that we have a hard time trusting RH management when they make us promises about what they're doing and why.
The short version: RH engineers---good, great even. RH management---seems to be out of touch with their customer relationships.
P.S. One thing that is the engineers' fault is this silly big-bang upgrade business. One of the reasons I'm now happily using Debian is that I never need to do the whole "back up the system in the middle of the night, do the upgrade, and pray" dance. Incremental upgrading rules, and for me is a precondition for using a Linux distro. Sure, the incremental upgrade means incremental breakage. But incremental breakage is just a lot easier to manage.
Re: Thank You! (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, I have never quite understood, what all the confusion was about regarding Fedora vs RHEL. After the first week or so after the announcement, I though that it was abundantly clear that Fedora was the Bleeding Edge Distro and RHEL was the Corporate Oriented Distro that made PHB's feel warm and fuzzy, 'cause they paid someone for support. And that the software developed/stabilized/proven in Fedora would eventually be integrated into RHEL.
My biggest beef with RH, is the Sales/Marketing side of the company. They make it very difficult to get additional RHN Entitlements and are not very timely.
Again, thanks!
RHAT, please rename "Fedora" to "Red Hat Linux". (Score:2, Interesting)
Face it, they've completely trashed all the brand equity in the "Fedora" product line.
The brand image of Fedora invokes the image of 'betrayal', 'lack of support', 'flipfloping', 'bugs' and nothing of any good that I can think of.
Red Hat Linux was a product many of us had trusted and upon which we could rely. Acknowledging this by killing the Fedora line and bringing back Red Hat Linux would help us see that you really understand what you've done.
This current announcement that sounds like they merely want to change the color of Fedora sounds like they just want to paint over their problems while the core remains broken.
Microsoft are a more open and sharing company ! (Score:3, Interesting)
When Windows server 2003 launched, I needed to get familiar with it, so I went to Microsoft's site and downloaded a 120 day eval copy. Using this, I was able to get familiar with the changes, etc.
When RHEL3 came out, I needed to do the same. Now, I'm an RHCE, so I've paid them a lot of my money directly (600 quid just for the exam), and sent even more money their way by recommending Red Hat wherever I went.
Do you think I could get an eval ? Fuck no! I called the Guildford office in London, I called the head office in the USA, I e-mailed, I tried everything.
Two months later, I had an interview at an investment bank, and they asked if I had experience with RHEL3. I explained that I didn't, but I had experience with RHEL 2.1AS as well as their free versions.
Microsoft 'get it' - they realise that if they help me learn their products, I can get a job using their products and they will sell more of their products. And I've never given MS a penny for training or certification.
Red Hat ? This bastion of freedom, this shining light of openness won't let me trial their products - they won't give you a thing to help you unless you pony up more money.
Sure, I could have spent the $200 on RHEL3 workstation, but with that attitude why should I? SuSE were quite happy to provide a trial version of SLES and now that's what I sell to all of my clients. I don't lose out, SuSE gains, and Red Hat lose out on a couple of enterprise contracts. It's all good
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
But you guys were paying for that shelf space, right? Some "random buys" aren't going to offset those costs. Red Hat may have been profiting from in-store sales* but I'm sure Corel and Mandrake hemorrhaged money when they were tying up huge blocks of CompUSA and Microcenter.
* It's not clear to me whether you're making an informed, official statement about the profitability of in-store sales or just speculating. If the latter, I'd gently suggest that your employer might want you to be a bit more circumspect in a forum like this.
Re:What is vibrant about it? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the same when you say Mandrake sells their distro, because they are selling you the media for $50. Redhat sells you the "subscription" for $180 PER YEAR.
Answer me this: Why are you distro hopping?
If you've been messing with linux as a casual user for several years, like most people, I'd bet it's because there isn't a RedHat anymore. Back in the late 90's and 2000-2001, everyone was using redhat. Everyone was customizing their desktop with redhat, everyone was downloading the latest Ximian, everyone was waiting on the next redhat to come out.
Then redhat fucked up.
Now people are distro hopping as you put it. They had the market cornered, and they were profitable selling the media and selling support when needed. They let their greed lead them straight into random obscurity, from having essentially a monopoly.