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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project 300

Posted by Zonk from the growing-up dept.
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."
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Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project More

Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

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  • As of yet... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john.lamar@NospaM.gmail.com> on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:36PM (#12715812) Homepage Journal
    I see nothing on Redhat's site or the Fedora site about this.

    Wouldn't that be the first place I should be looking?

  • Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anandpur ( 303114 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:38PM (#12715832)
    Is this because ubuntu [ubuntulinux.org] is gaining popularity and large number of GNOME developres are in ubuntu camp?

    • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:57PM (#12716070)
      Fedora's growth rate is 3 times that of the next fastest growing distro, Gentoo. In a little under 2 years Fedora has over 400,000 live servers on the net (yes a few were prior RH servers, but estimates show only about 10,000 - 20,000). Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers. Fedora is overtaking Suse (they are about 25,000 servers apart). The two biggest distros are Red Hat Enterprise with 1.6 million servers and Debian with 760,000 servers. Most of the Ubuntu users are previous Debian testing and unstable users and previous Gentoo users. Red Hat is currently by far the biggest supporter of Gnome, the only company that ever claim close was Ximian. Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Gnome including developers, HIGs, user studies, quality assurance, and general advancement of the free desktop. Ubuntu is not even in the same ballpark as Fedora, its users just make a lot of noise and its founder has a lot of money for PR.
      Regards,
      Steve

      • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) *
        Do you have any sources for those numbers? Just curious.

        Your numbers talk about servers for Fedora, Debian, SuSE and RedHat; but my experience is that Ubuntu & Gentoo is mostly used for workstations (including individual development servers), RHEL & Debian is mostly production & shared development servers, Fedora & SuSE are popular in both places-- so you're almost comparing apples to oranges to bananas.

        Most of the Ubuntu users are previous Debian testing and unstable users and previous G

      • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Uber Banker ( 655221 )
        There is a difference between a growth rate and an amount grown. You said growth rate but only quoted numbers.

        If A grows faster than B, it will eventually over take it (given this faster growth is sustained), while B can still grow by a greater absolute amount than A.

        Also, do you have a source for those numbers?

      • Re:Ubuntu ? (Score:5, Funny)

        by chrisbtoo ( 41029 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @02:26PM (#12716876) Journal
        Gentoo's growth rate is fast but they still are only around 63,000 servers

        There would be a load more than that, but we're all still waiting for it to finish compiling.
    • Very unlikely. It probably has much more to do with Red Hat's move into the server market - they don't seem too concerned with desktop linux because that's really not how they make their money. The things they do in the server market you might be able to attribute to reactions to whatever else is happening with other vendors, but they just don't focus on Fedora anymore, that's why they're letting it go.

      Giving more control to an external foundation is a good thing. I hope the developers run with it.

  • what about KDE? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Karma Sucks ( 127136 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:39PM (#12715850)
    Will this finally put KDE development on an equal footing with GNOME in Fedora? Will KDE improvements from KDE developers to the RPM packages in Fedora now be accepted?

    Right now KDE suffers a big disadvantage vs GNOME. It is held crippled by "desktop" rules but not in the same way as GNOME. The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream like PlastiK defaults.

    So, I say again, will this be an opportunity for true improvement of KDE in Fedora? And if not, why not?
    • Good point. I have never had much experience with KDE - mainly because I've always used RH or FC and GNOME is much better represented.
      • Most of my Linux experience was with Mandrake, and even that uses GNOME by default. I've always prefered the Look&Feel of KDE, though. Having said that, I've yet to use a K app that I liked.

        • Re:what about KDE? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ArsonSmith ( 13997 )
          I know what you mean. I wish the look and feel guys from KDE would get together with the application guys of gnome. work together rather than seperately. right now we have competeing desktops that both suck. Picking and choosing and combining efforts would work much better.
          • Exactly. I install both KDE and GNOME. That way I can use KDE for WM tasks and have all th gt libraries to run GNOME and other gtk apps. Except for poorly written/designed apps, the KDE Look&Feel renders GNOME apps consitently with the KDE fare.
    • "The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream"

      I have no idea what you're talking about. Fedora Core always includes an updated version of KDE. FC4 has KDE 3.4.0, for instance.

      -Erwos
      • Which part of PlastiK defaults did you not understand? KDE in FC is using an OUTDATED Redhat theme compared to GNOME and they don't even have the decency to change KDE back to PlasTiK.
        • That's ONE THING. Your post made it sound like they never touched KDE. That's flatly untrue.

          It's not like you can't use Plastik, either. I mean, listen to yourself: you're whining they didn't use your favorite theme. Get over it.

          -Erwos

          • Re:what about KDE? (Score:3, Informative)

            by Karma Sucks ( 127136 )
            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?
            • no GTK-Qt

              To be fair, gtk-qt is still quite buggy, and I don't blame distros for not touching it yet. Besides the graphical glitches, it segfaults on FreeBSD when running a GTK app over remote X.

              If you like KDE, you're probably better off with SuSE, or better yet a distro like Gentoo where the maintainers don't pick a default desktop for you.

      • Fedora doesn't release any updates for KDE after it (Fedora) is released. I use KDE-RedHat for all my KDE upgrading needs (and I get full mpeg support then).

    • Re:what about KDE? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @01:01PM (#12716111) Homepage Journal

      My guess is that Red Hat will primarily be paying Red Hat engineers to work on Gnome, and I would also bet that the folks that work on FC will continue to work on making the Gnome and KDE stuff look similar. In other words the KDE stuff will continue to look like the Gnome stuff.

      For this to change then the KDE community would have to get a lot more involved with the FC community. In fact, they would have to get enough involved that they could change the course of the distribution. I am not part of the FC community, but I have watched enough Free Software projects that I would be very surprised if this signalled a big change. Red Hat is doing all it can to make Fedora as independent as possible, but it still is going to be providing the bulk of the actual development time.

  • Reaction to Ubuntu success? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by georgep77 ( 97111 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:40PM (#12715855) Homepage Journal
    It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions. As in the commercial world open source projects live and die by "mindshare" almost as much as technical merit. The spinning off of Fedora sounds like an attempt to recapture some lost mindshare.

    Cheers,
    _GP_

    • Re:Reaction to Ubuntu success? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @01:03PM (#12716125)
      " It seems to me that the rise in popularity of Ubuntu has caused "ripples" of concern amoung some of the more established (read older) distributions."

      I don't think so. The people who go for Ubuntu seem to be in large part the same people who went for Gentoo a year ago (and were making these sorts of comments then as well) - and they'll go for the next du jour in 2006. They're a very vocal group - especially in places like /. - but the actual installed base is pretty inconsequential.
      • You forget that Ubuntu has converted a lot of former Debian users because they have a similar Free Software philosophy to Debian, employ a lot of old Debian programmers and the OS works the same way.

        It's also worth noting that people use Ubuntu because it beats the pants off Fedora for ease of use. Gentoo or any other distro-of-the-month never did that, they only offered gimmicks. Simple Debian isn't a gimmick.
      • I think you are very very wrong about that. The people I see switching to Ubuntu in droves are the people who used to run distributions like Fedora, Debian proper, and Mandrake. And yeah, I would include Gentoo in the mix. But it's not users looking for the new distro-of-the-month. It's users looking for the best all around distribution that is community driven.
      • I don't think it's the distro du jour effect. Not for me anyway. Gentoo met all my important criteria in a single distro.
        • No need to boot off a CD to upgrade the distro
        • No need to download RPMs/packages manually
        • Wide choice of packages
        • Modern, and up to date
        • One command install
        • Packages compiled with exactly the right options for my systems.
        • Stable and secure.
        • Lots of archs supported.
      • 1995 called. They want their (NT) inevitability argument back.

  • Change of Direction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:41PM (#12715871) Homepage Journal
    I see that they are willing to support "new Fedora" with engineering and financial assistance, but I wonder how long they will continue to help if the disto takes a turn that they do not support.

    What if Fedora begins to look, over time, more like Debian? Would they continue to provide engineering and financial support for that?

    An earlier article [slashdot.org] about Redhat developers wanting to dump old platforms may indicate how tolerant they are in supporting ideals that do not fit into their business model.
    • 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

  • Thats good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brickballs ( 839527 ) <brickballs@gmail ... m minus language> on Friday June 03, 2005 @12:41PM (#12715873) Homepage
    Fedoras a decent operating system, I'v used it at times before. but what I'm really interested in is the patent reform.

    From the article:

    "Red Hat also promises to bolster its work on patent reform. After his discussion on open source licensing on Thursday, Webbink told CRN that many vendors including Red Hat and Nokia are pushing for is patent and copyright reforms because current laws presents obstacles to the open source movement. For its part, Red Hat is working with the European Parliament to modify the Computer-Implemented Inventions directive, Red Hat said. In the U.S., Red Hat has called for reform of the patent system to ensure better patent quality."

    It looks to me linke Europs really doing better on patent reform than the US. I'm really hoping that we can get our stuff together here stateside before its too late.
  • I wonder what lessons, if any, Red Hat has learned from the past two years, and if they would do it all over again?
  • This is good news. Next, we need "Full Democracy" in selecting foundation officials. We could adopt Debian's approach.
  • It has been a while since I've followed the redhat camp. I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades. As recently as a few months ago, my brother in law switched to Gentoo in frustration after he ran into too much hastle trying to get a SQL package installed on his redhat laptop. The last thing I heard with a bearing on this topic was work being done by Ian Murdock attempting to bring Redhat and Debian closer together [arstechnica.com]
  • "In their continuing efforts to remove themselves from the "little people," Red Hat announced today they will distance themselves from the Fedora Project and spin it off. You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base by EOL'ing Red Hat Linux 9 and decided not to release another desktop version for the masses. Rather, they directed these users to their Fedora Project; assuring customers at the time that they stood solidly behind the project (this despite leaving many customers with

    • You may recall that Red Hat abandoned (read fscked!) their end user base by EOL'ing Red Hat Linux 9 and decided not to release another desktop version for the masses.

      When they first announced Fedora, that was sort of my take on it. I was unhappy about it, but willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. In my opinion time has shown that they have done exactly what they said, and not screwed anyone. The Fedore Core distributions have had the same degree of quality I had come to expect of the RHL d

    • I never thought of it like that. How dare they make business decisions to ensure their fiscal viability for investors when they could be doing shit for free and giving it to me!

      They're just greedy that's all. Right, jav1231? Not like us, who are demanding free shit! We're not greedy!

  • I wonder what will happen to Fedora legacy support with RH out of the picture?

    • Re:Fedora Legacy (Score:3, Informative)

      by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) *
      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.

  • We knew this when redhat first said they were going to stop giving away free support back in april of 2003 and that RH9 would the the last "free" supported version. Furthermore we were told to look to the new Fedora distribution (core 1) which would be a separate entity from RH.

    • We knew this when redhat first said they were going to stop giving away free support back in april of 2003

      What on earth are you talking about? The free support for RHL was mailing lists and Bugzilla, with no service level agreement for either. The free support for Fedora is exactly the same.

      The only thing that went away was PAID support. When you PURCHASED an official RHL box, you got 30 days of PAID installation support with it, and you could BUY additional support.

  • "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."

    For all this good talk about respecting people's creative energy and IP reform, they are at present trampling on the real Fedora [fedora.info] project's rights.
    • they are at present trampling on the real Fedora project's rights.

      Interesting. Have you got any more details of what the restrictions they're concerned about are?

      Re:

      Red Hat's use of the Fedora(TM) brand name and its assertion of ownership over that name are of considerable concern to the Cornell and Virginia Fedora(TM) project team. Red Hat's guidelines for use of the Fedora(TM) brand place restrictions on use of a term for which the Cornell and Virginia team have over five years of prior use. This pos

  • Ubuntu has two flavors, Gnome and KDE, in the form of Ubuntu and Kubuntu. So when will Fedora get a Kedora, i.e. a flavor that does not have KDE as a second-class desktop?

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