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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open? 216

Posted by CmdrTaco from the nice-hat dept.
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."
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Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open? More

Red Hat Trying to Make Fedora More Open?

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  • FUDCon (Score:4, Funny)

    by Verveonica ( 839966 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:04PM (#11350223)
    Ah...so they are sucking them in and grinding them up into FUD! Don't go to the conference man - Fedora is people!

    • Re:FUDCon (Score:3, Funny)

      by Golias ( 176380 )
      Fedora is people!

      You are my new hero.

      You also owe me a keyboard, as I just sprayed my soda all over mine while reading that.

      -Signed,
      Yet Another Former Red Hat Linux User

    • Re:FUDCon (Score:2, Interesting)

      by demachina ( 71715 )
      "although their choice of acronyms for their conference leaves something to be desired"

      I dont know about that .... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt pretty much sums up Fedora and the new Red Hat pretty darn well. You know since they:

      - stuck a knife in the back of their loyal users, customers and flagship distribution that was a popular and well known standard. If nothing else they don't know anything about protecting their brand
      -Started a subscription update service and then in less than a year(and the length
      • Is posts like the above.

        * 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. I
        • "The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"

          Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned [internetnews.com] support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter. I was on 8, 9 being a rather minor update and no one knows why you did a major version bump and I didn't bother with it.

          I guess I should be thankful to your fine company that I was in the middle of a one year subscription when you stopped doing any updates and abandoned your distributions while they were still in their prime, and told eve
          • "The subscription is still going fine. What are you talking about?"

            Uh, I guess nuthin other than you abandoned support for Red hat 7, 8 and 9 in the space of a quarter.

            Er, what does end of lifing a product have to do with abandoning a model we still use today? If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat), then say so. But since that was the stated lifetime for Red Hat 8, your complaints wouldn't wash. Go read before you complain.

            I wa
            • "If you're complaining about 8 being end of lifed 2 years after release (and then being further extended by Red Hat),"

              If this was some kind of long established plan how did you manage to end of life THREE major versions in the space of quarter. You didn't release them all in the space of a quarter did you?

              "That's a problem they've acknowledged - if you actually talk to them about this grievance, rather than screaming loudly on Slashdot amongst a bunch of lies, they'll cut you a rather nice deal on RHEL s

    • Re:FUDCon (Score:2, Informative)

      by CapnGrunge ( 233552 )
      Hahaha, that makes it doubly funny for Mexicans, since FUD [sigma-alimentos.com] is also a well-known mark of minced meat.
  • Do I sense a coming of distro splits/forks?

    • Already Happened (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Inhibit ( 105449 )
      The fork/split stuff already happened. With no one contributing to Fedora, they pretty much went off and did CentOS and White Box.

      Wrote up a short editorial over at PCBurn [pcburn.com] with links to the relevant distributions (or you could use Google ;).

  • I am just confused (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:08PM (#11350265)
    One day redhat wants to put all the best resources in improving RH enterprise series.

    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.

    • Even Linux companies (Score:3, Interesting)

      by paranode ( 671698 )
      Have to make money to survive. They are focusing on their server market now, because at the present that's where most of the Linux use is.

      • Re:Even Linux companies (Score:4, Insightful)

        by JudasBlue ( 409332 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:43PM (#11350746)
        And they have lost at least some paid server installs over this. I mean, I understand their thinking. But I know of two techs who were Redhat-centric who switched first for desktops because they felt that Fedora wasn't stable enough. This led to the same two techs starting to recommend SuSE's server product for installs.

        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.
        • "...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."

          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

      • Re:Even Linux companies (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Karn ( 172441 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @03:36PM (#11351528)
        Warning: Redhat Rant Ahead

        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.
    • The cynical side of me says this is just the first step in abandoning Fedora altogether. If they just drop it now, the community will hate RedHat even more than they already do. So, they "open it up" more and more, putting members of the community (not on their payroll) in charge of more and more important modules, until eventually they have no paid employees working on the project at all. They'll give unpaid maintainers more and more freedoms to do what they wish, until they finally decide to abandon Fe
    • I was tracking Red Hat Linux distributions up through 9.
      I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.
      Most folks on /. seem to think this is a "feature."
      But I only have one computer at home and I need to have Windows XP available.

      So I am stuck with Windows XP, Redhat 9, and Debian stable on my machine.
      I can't get Debian to work properly with everything I have on Redhat 9.

      At work, people ask me what I think about Linux. I wish I could recommend an up to date distribution that I use at
      • I did not move to Fedora because of the Windows XP dual boot issue.

        I'm just curious what issue you're referring to. I'm a late-commer to fedora core 3 (amd64) which I just downloaded and installed this weekend. I'm using it in a dual boot setup with WindowsXP on my laptop and haven't seen any problems related to dual boot issues. The only pain was having to add mp3 support, and finding no 64-bit Thunderbird builds, or 64-bit flashplayer support (I'm still tyring to get GNUFlash to compile in 64-bit).

      • Fedora was billed FROM THE START as a beta-level distro. It was never (nor is it still) intended to be a stable, rock solid platform.

        Now, I could go into why this is a bad idea on Redhat's part, but never mind.

        What would I recommend instead of Fedora? I wouldn't. You need to choose your own Linux path based on your experience, ability to learn and/or bank account.
    • Dude, if it makes you feel better, think of Fedora Core 3 as "RedHat 12".
    • Improving Fedora does improve Red Hat Enterprise - Fedora is maintained over time. Every so often, established technology from a Fedora Fedora (that's already made it through three Fedora beta cycles) is taken, tested even further, and put into an Enterprise Linux release.

  • Conference acronym (Score:3, Funny)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:09PM (#11350277) Journal
    "Attention all personnel! Incoming Microsoft press release! Set FUD CON 1 throughout the facility!"
  • As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default. Especially when I tell the installer I live outsite the US.

    • Re:Here's some pointers (Score:3, Informative)

      by nzkoz ( 139612 )
      That's just *not* going to happen, Thomson charges $5 per 'unit'. If the mp3 rpms were on the installation CD, I'd imagine that redhat would be liable for that fee. Even if only non-americans installed it.

      Besides, http://rpm.livna.org is your friend.
    • You know what ?

      Launch your preferred shell, then :
      su -
      yum search mp3
      yum install xmms-mp3
      exit
      The first two points can be skipped if you 1) are already logged in as root (bad), and 2) you already know the name of the xmms-mp3 package (oh, wait, I just told you... ;))...

      Is it really so hard ?

    • Where you live makes no difference to Redhat's legal libility for patent violations.
    • As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default.

      That *EXACTLY* the reason I left Redhat. They started taking out things I use on a daily basis. If I have to look for programs on users websites, and also re-compile my own programs, why am I using that distro?

      Fedora had too many problems, driver detection, missing librarys, broken programs, xwindows configuration wasnt even on the same level as SuSE or Mandrake.

      Now I use Gentoo and Mandrake, depending on the hardware. Fedora just do
    • As my first recommendation, MP3 support should be installed by default. Especially when I tell the installer I live outsite the US.

      Isn't it Fraunhofer who holds the license for MP3? Aren't they from Germany? Aren't they the ones who collect money for MP3? Don't they hold an international patent?
    • To avoid "the sharks" in the world that would sue on the behalf of whom ever. It isn't necessarily a move to protect themselves from RIAA...it is more to protect themselves from being charged by the group that owns the MP3 encoding standard.

      The good news is it is easy to get MP3 support back into your RH or Fedora install. It is just RH nor the Fedora crew are going to help you do it. Given the nature of some litegation happy parts of the tech world I'm more than happy with Fedora's decision leave out t
  • I just installed Fedora. Can someone tell me the difference between using Yum and the RedHat Update Network? It seems to me that the Gnome applet uses the update network, and I thought you had to pay to access it. Sorry for the offtopic question, but I've been wondering about this for a while.
    • The gnome applet is actually using yum.

      The 'redhat network' is for enterprise customers only.
    • Yum seems to need less resources than the RedHat Update network. When installing Fedora on a low end system it makes a lot of difference.
    • It seems to me that the Gnome applet uses the update network

      The gnome applet uses the RHAT update network to run updates if you click, but otherwise checks to see if you're up-to-date using RPM. So, if you use yum it will still correctly tell you whether you're software is up to date or not.
    • With yum, you can choose which update mirror to use, unlike the RedHat Network. There's no annual subscription charge. Also, yum can resolve dependencies, so if you want to install a package it will work out what you need. And also, you can upgrade OS versions, say RH7.1 to RH7.3 using yum. Yum downloads all the packages and dependencies, and runs the upgrade scripts. Check your kernel is OK, reboot and you're done. Previously, we'd have half an hour downtime to upgrade a production server, insert CD, have
    • You should just remove the up2date gnome-applet unless you are subscribed to RHN. It is exactly as you say: a pay for access service for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The gnome-applet "throbber" does nothing except use 30M of memory and take up space on the panel unless you're subscribed. Just do a "rpm -e up2date" you'll missing nothing if you're running Fedora Core.

  • I like Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 ) <drew@nOsPaM.zhrodague.net> on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:13PM (#11350338) Homepage Journal
    I actually like Fedora. I've been a Red Hat fan since 4.2 sparc (IIRC, MHILAS). Relatively consistant installation process, sensemaking install dirs, and RPMs have been slightly more fun than building source for this non-developer.

    Currently I use FC3 for a desktop, and FC2 for a GIS workstation. I have installed Red Hat at dotcoms, small businesses, hosting facilities, and mega-corporations. Of course, I'm familiar with it, and I remember making a DNS server from junk broken Windows box to full function in 20 minutes.

    I have been considering contributing to their package, I guess now I can.
    • I bet they would appreciate it even more if you recommended Redhat WS or ES rather than Fedora.
  • i think RH is just trying to gain higher moral ground by further open sourcing the Fedora distro. After all Suse is gaining momentum. Rehat vs. IBM + Novell/Suse + Sun 1) Sun's JavaDesktop [sun.com] is based on Suse Linux, and provides a very good mechanism for updates, for just one time cost of $50 (includes Star Office). 2) Sun and Novell(parent company of Suse) are the 2 top contributors to Star Office / Open Office. 3) IBM and Suse have been in bed for a while. Especially in the Lotus Notes area. 4) N
    • i think RH is just trying to gain higher moral ground by further open sourcing the Fedora distro

      I really don't understand what you mean by this. Both Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora Core are 100% opensourced, so how can they be opensourced further?

  • Reputation? (Score:3, Informative)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:26PM (#11350515) Homepage Journal
    After trying Core 1 and 2, I switched to SUSE and never looked back. I've heard Core 3 isn't as full of bugs as the first 2 were but...I like SUSE now. Things *just work* compared to Fedora. Plus the whole distribution seems more polished and unified. Also, it's much easier to buy SUSE 9.2 Professional at Fry's for my desktop and even a server or two and buy enterprise level support for it if I need to (haven't yet). Much easier to justify to management. But Fedora has its place. I'm just curious to see if SUSE will start catching on with corporate America. I'm doing my best at my company. One more thing...compare SUSE 9.2 Porfessional to Redhat WS. Significant difference on price.

  • Finally, but timely? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by augustz ( 18082 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:31PM (#11350571)
    When Redhat first started up Fedora (to much noise everywhere) I spent a fair amount of time poking around with an eye towards getting involved.

    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:Finally, but timely? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by gdek ( 202709 )

      Yep. Exactly right.

      The 3rd party repos that have popped up to fill the gaps have provided an invaluable service. The goal of Fedora Extras is similar -- but instead of providing individual repositories, Fedora Extras will provide a centralized repository that is more tightly integrated with Fedora Core. Ultimately, anyone who can build a package that conforms to the rules will be able to contribute to Fedora Extras.

      And timely? Maybe not as timely as it could have been... but better late than never.

    • Re:Finally, but timely? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by crush ( 19364 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @05:33PM (#11352715)
      Part of the slowness of Fedora Extras was that Red Hat had to set up a single CVS system for it and also merge three pre-existing internal CVS into it. Bound to take a fair bit of time to do. Seth Vidal gives a good insight on the process in his blog [sethdot.org] including the rolling out of a demonstration Pre-Extras so that people can see progress. Hopefully all the excellent independent packagers: Dag Wieers, Axel Thimm, Matthias Saou will be able to find a way to contribute to this project.

  • About time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OblongPlatypus ( 233746 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:36PM (#11350661)
    To everyone who's trying to interpret the "intentions" behind this "new move" from Redhat: This is basically what they've been planning all along - they've just been dreadfully slow going about it.
  • It lacks some fine polishing ...
    The patch system blows and updating usually makes a
    machine unusable...

    Now if the Mepis guys would just get around to supporting a root file system on a scsi device instead of just IDE I would never have to look at
    Fedora again. Mepis just plain works right from the start but it just won't work on a scsi disk.

  • docs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by IceFox ( 18179 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @02:50PM (#11350851) Homepage
    How about updating the *$^&%$& document on how to make rpm's? Is that so much to ask?

    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

  • scared of Ubuntu? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by blixblix ( 695632 )
    Am i the only one who thinks this is a response to the recent success that Ubuntu has had?

    I've personally been all over the place with my choice of preferred distro. Ubuntu is the nicest desktop linux I've found.

  • CVS (Score:3, Informative)

    by coolfrood ( 459411 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @03:26PM (#11351373) Homepage
    The Fedora CVS is available at http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/ [redhat.com]. Lots of goodies there!
  • The primary goal of the Fedora project is to develop the OSS tools (such as gnome) that they will one day sell in their commercial software. When the first Fedora came out, it was THE major free Gnome distro- without it Gnome would have developed at a slower pace.

    But nowadays the Fedora project is not as crucial. Newer projects such as Ubuntu are now sharing the burden that Fedora has of developing the software. Redhat doesn't care how Gnome and what not gets better as long as it does.

    Now that the burde

  • Does this mean sometime that the MySQL packages in Fedora Core 4 will actually be the ones from MySQL.com, and not one big shoddy package?

    Since I choose to install the RPM files from MySQL, some of the other packages that are now dependent on it (e.g: dovecot) fail to install.

    Yippie.

  • Red Hat got a lot of flack for previous Fedorae that were too buggy or made it too hard for independent developers to write into the repository.

    Fedora 3 seems to be better (been running it for a couple of months), but I do notice the annoyances like lack of fonts, shockwave, acrobat, flash player, java, nVidia X drivers, etc. that one comes to expect.

    Red Hat can make a fine living by loading the luxury items onto Fedora 3 and calling it RHEL 4, providing support, etc.

    But with other developers also provi

  • Are the bugs fixed?

    I remember old posts here that found 3 bugs including setting GDM and XDM, X.org, and one with openoffice.

    I have been quite disapointed with Linux distros over the years since I started using them in 98. I find them becoming less and less reliable and more bugy and resource hugs.

    Anyway how often is Fedora updated? I may switch back to RedHat Fedora after a disapoint with the bugs in SuSE and FreeBSD5.3.

    I am not a troll, but a student and does not have the time to continually tinker wi
    • I noticed a lot of bugs initially in FC3 - enough to make me switch to another distro. But I reinstalled it last weekend and there have been a lot of updates that fixed many of the problems I had (mainly USB related). Updates have been daily for the past two weeks according to fedoranews.org.
      I have SuSe 9.2 on my laptop, but I am going to stick with FC3 on my desktop machine for now.

  • Ditching RH Desktop was a dumb move. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Isldeur ( 125133 ) on Thursday January 13, 2005 @06:02PM (#11352984)
    When redhat ditched their normal desktop product in favor of this "Fedora" thing it struck me as a critically stupid move.

    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. :)
  • Under the new revised GPL (soon to be released), if you just use a GPL program you must make 12 copies of the source and distribute them to your friends and family members.

    RedHat implemented this for a week. One engineer said, "Man.. I mean everyone I know has a copy now. And I've received so many copies that I can't see out the rear view window of my car." Another engineer found two CDs in his hamburger during lunch! "This is getting ridiculous....", he said.

    Suprisingly, there are areas of M$ that

  • ...but here on /. we still have the Trollfest.

    Cheers
    Stor

  • Fedora was a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)

    by doodleboy ( 263186 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @12:07AM (#11356796)
    So Redhat has this great plan to monetize its relationship with its users. It'll split its line into RHEL, which is being faithfully copied by the free alternatives CentOS and Whitebox, and Fedora, a time based distribution meant to be a testbed for future versions of RHEL. Fantastic. I guess I'm supposed to be a beta tester for some enterprise version of linux that I can't/won't pay for.

    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?

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