Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

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."

Re:As of yet...

[DrinkingIllini]

From the article...

At the Red Hat Summit, Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel at Red Hat, is expected to announce the creation of the Fedora Foundation and the Software Patent Commons.

That is why there isn't anything on the websites yet, it hasn't been "officially" announced.

Re:As of yet...

[brontus3927]

This was reported on CRN this morning, and apparently InfoWeek. Google News lists articles of this from Business Wire, GeekCoffee, and eWeek, among others.

Re:As of yet...

[brontus3927]

Oops, I meant to link to those articles.

CRN [crn.com], GeekCoffee [geekcoffee.net], Business Wire [businesswire.com], and eWeek [eweek.com]

Re:Change of Direction

[LnxAddct]

Fedora is the base of their Enterprise Linux line. Whatever Fedora does will become a large chunk of RHEL. Red Hat pays their engineers to work on Fedora, Fedora will still be headed by Red Hat engineers, just from a financial and project standpoint they'll be more independant.
Regards,
Steve

Re:umbilical

[LnxAddct]

Fedora is officially a testbed of technologies to be integrated into RHEL. Fedora is more or less the base for their enterprise line and that is the plan. Fedora will still be headed by red hat engineers and still funded by red hat, just from a political/financial standpoint they'll be more independant and more open to outside developers. This is already being shown with Fedora Core 4 and the Extras repository.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success?

[Kristoffer Lunden]

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 money for a good cause. Apparently he's from South Africa(?), and feels that the world, especially the poorer part, needs a cheap, open and reliable alternative. This is the same guy who had enough money to buy himself a spacetrip, so I guess he can afford it.

Sorry, I'm not sure on the exact details, but I'm sure that interview can be found on google if you want to.

Re:what about KDE?

[Karma Sucks]

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:Fedora Legacy

[Eric Smith]

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.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[Anonymous Coward]

He is quoting a survey [netcraft.com] that did NOT include Ubunutu, as discussed previously [slashdot.org].

Re:Tin Foil Hat, not Red Hat.

[jmorris42]

> 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 technology. See SELinux, udev, heck even the 2.6 kernel.

Currently RH does ship some closed components, such as a JDK, Acrobat, Flash, etc. But they do it on a totally seperate CD-ROM called Extras. As far as I know they don't own the rights to a single line of code that isn't currently Free or in the process of becoming free (some parts of their new directory server aren't yet Free Software but is scheduled to become so) so it would be crossing a bright red line if they ever produced a closed package.

If you don't believe me, go to ftp.redhat.com and download the entire source for RHEL and look at the license tags on the packages. 100% OSS/FS product and likely to remain that way. RH 'gets it' on the value of Open so they aren't likely to do something as suicidal as what you are afraid of.

Re:Translation

[RPoet]

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.

Re:Ubuntu ?

[LnxAddct]

Here's one of the sources [netcraft.com]. Sorry about that, I cited it in some other posts but forgot in this one :) The other sources were places like newsforge, but the exact links I can't seem to find right now. My intent was not to start any kind of flame war, just to note an observation. The misinformation spread on slashdot recently is ridiculous and I'm just trying to counter it a bit. Whether or not someone agrees with me though I guess is a different story.
Regards,
Steve