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Red Hat Software Businesses

Red Hat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation 118

Posted by Hemos from the divesting-control dept.
rob writes " Computer Business Review is reporting that Red Hat has announced plans to hand over control of its Fedora community-led Linux development project to the new Fedora Foundation as part of a new three-pronged intellectual property strategy. "
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Red Hat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation More

Red Hat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation

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  • dupe (Score:5, Informative)

    by professorhojo ( 686761 ) * on Monday June 06, 2005 @11:31AM (#12736493)
    seems like a dupe: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 1712208&tid=110&tid=106 [slashdot.org]
  • What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?

    • Re:What is official RH distro then? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ColonelKernel ( 566554 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @11:40AM (#12736581)
      Fedora, since its inception, was its own distribution. Redhat created Fedora to help mantain a free (as in beer) distribution based on Redhat. The official Redhat distribution will be as it has since the beginning of the Fedora project. The Redhat branded products, such as AS, ES, and WS will be the Redhat official releases. What Redhat in effect is doing is creating a division between Redhat and the Fedora project much like the division between Redhat and SuSE.

      • Re:What is official RH distro then? (Score:4, Informative)

        by maynard ( 3337 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @11:50AM (#12736684) Journal
        Note that the source rpm packages for all the Redhat Enterprise editions are still publicaly available - as per GPL requirements. While Redhat won't give you free binaries, there are plenty of places that will. If you're looking for Redhat Enterprise 3 or 4, try: Scientific Linux [scientificlinux.org]. It's basically just a recompile of all the Redhat packages with some bundled scientific software (which you can easily remove). I've got SL3 deployed on about a hundred and fifty desktop hosts and it's rock solid. --M

      • what Redhat in effect is doing is creating a division between Redhat and the Fedora project much like the division between Redhat and SuSE.

        Not exactly. Fedora is essentially the groundwork for future editions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Yes, they are different distros, but the division is not that significant. Structurally, they are very much the same.

      • It's more free than free beer. Redhat has no more right to Linux than you or I. It is important for them to keep Fedora moving so as to continue to have the development community behind them.

        And while Fedora and the RHEL/RHAS/RHWhatever technically sprang from the older "RedHat" model, last I checked, RHEL/RHAS/RHWhatever derive from Fedora.

        Spinning off Fedora is wise on the part of Redhat. Now the window of opportunity for Novell to strike up SuSE marketshare through Redhat alienating the communit

    • What isn't clear to me is: does Fedora become a Linux distro on its own? If so, what is the official RedHat distro then? Would that move to (non-free) Enterprise versions then?

      Fedora has always been a separate distro, ever since Fedora Core 1 was released in 2003. Red Hat wanted more external developers to work on their code, but if I have been following things correctly, many developers were wary of contributing as Red Hat still had the final say of what was included and what wasn't. Hence Red Hat want
    • That question will be answered in the ever-elusive Fourth Prong.
  • Finally a competitor for Debian, or is it just to much for Red Hat to keep investing in a release for users.
    Not that Debian is a pure user release, but at least it is completely assembled by them.
  • Come on guys, not only is this a "dupe", it's a dupe from only this weekend.

    • Re:Fresh Dupe (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sturm ( 914 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @12:17PM (#12736989) Journal
      Do duplicate stories in some way, shape or form hurt you? Do they cause evil or bad fortune to descend upon you and your family? Do they offend your delicate sense of what is good and just in the universe? Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass?
      If you answered "No" to all the above questions, maybe you should quit your whiny-ass bitching about duplicate stories and contribute something meaninful to another discussion.
      • Do they cause you to have pimples on your ass?


        Oh, so *that's* where these damn pimples come from!

      • Some people don't like mediocrity, and are frustrated by the suspicion that just a little bit more work (checking for duplicate stories, editing submissions, etc) would make the site a lot better.

        (Above, I use the word "suspicion" because most people don't know what it's like to run a site so large, and can only speculate.)

        The faq [slashdot.org] says they want to get the stories out fast, but that's bogus [slashdot.org].

  • Redhat still trying to figure out how to lure the opensource community back.
    • Open source community trying to figure out how to get Red Has to stop calling and calling, even though OSS has given Red Hat every possible signal that it's no longer interested.

      Damn stalker distros.
    • Redhat still trying to figure out how to lure the opensource community back.

      Are you talking about the open source community that includes people like Alan Cox [redhat.com], Ingo Molnar [redhat.com], Havoc Pennington [ometer.com], and Owen Taylor [redhat.com]? It never left.

      Are you part of a new, anti-RedHat OSS community? What have you written?
      • While your point is valid, so was GP's.

        The open source community isn't always centered around enterprise solutions. When RedHat removed their "personal" distro and focused only on enterprise, they alienated a lot of people, even though they continued to contribute to OSS in a big way.

        I was one of them...I used RedHat exclusively on all my machines, but the move to Fedora pushed me away (the last FC I tried was .95, and it drove me nuts), and drove me to Debian, and now finally Gentoo, which I have run on

        • Re:Which open source community was that? (Score:5, Informative)

          by tux_deamon ( 663650 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @01:53PM (#12737873)
          But Red Hat didn't remove their "personal" distro, they just renamed it "Fedora Core". They've provided a fairly robust infrastructure for supporting it.

          And even though the product that pays the bills retains the name "Red Hat", it's as Open Source as any distro you can find. That's why I can download distro's like CentOS and WhiteBox that are exact clones of RHEL developed almost exclusively from the SRPM's released openly by the RHEL project.

          If anyone in the OSS community is annoyed by the reoganization, it's probably because it is a little confusing. But this is it in a nutshell:

          One product is a cutting edge distro for all of us to enjoy using and developing.

          One product is the stable branch of an older version of the community disto that's packaged and sold with support to big corporations who gain from chosing the software.

          There's nothing wrong with selling OSS. Consider RMS:

          "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover cost.

          Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." - Richard Stallman

          Red Hat employs developers who not only use OSS, but contribute a great deal of it back to the community for all of us to enjoy -- even those of us who don't run Red Hat distributions personally. Again, RMS:

          "Red Hat's contributing to the GNU project by hiring people to write on the GNU desktop, Gnome, which is a very useful contribution."
          • I wasn't going to reply, but I feel compelled to.

            First, I never objected to selling Open Source Software. You're simply misreading me in that regard.

            Second, I never said that their enterprise distro wasn't open. It has been, and as far as I can tell, will continue to be.

            My beef is that they took a product I most valued them for (a desktop, personal OS) and made a move that *reduced* their ownership of that product. They handed is back to the community, in effect, offering a substantial amount of suppo
  • What I really want to know is will MPlayer ever be an official Fedora Extra package? I know the answer as long as Red Hat controls it is "No, there are patents and other questionably legal stuff in MPlayer". However, other distros like Debian ship it (anyone else like to comment on others like Gentoo?). However, with this change separating it from Red Hat is it possible that Extras could get some of these "Rogue" packages?

    Personally, I think the answer is a solid "maybe".
  • ... seems to be an unusual ammount of them lately. Wonder what's going on?
  • Wasn't Fedora Core 4 supposed to be released today and taken out of beta?

  • How does this benefit RH? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by bcmm ( 768152 )
    Is this so that they can release their paid-for version and still fullfill their obligations under the GPL at less cost?

  • I just hope it's not the classic 3 prong strategy (Score:3, Funny)

    by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @11:50AM (#12736683)

    1) Do something.
    2) ???
    3) Profit!

  • Linux and Free Software are not perfect (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is coming from a user who has been casually been trying to get into Linux since Red Hat 6.2, and has each time gone back to Windows. I still like it, but there is a ton of shit that bugs me about it:

    1) No unification in package management. RPM is flawed (hi dependancy hell), and YUM is only a bandaid on the solution. DEB is great, but only debian based distributions support it. Windows may have multiple companies doing install programs, but at least they're all doing mostly the same thing.
    2) The re

    • I really gotta step in here, I just can't take this kind of ignorance.

      1) No unification in package management. RPM is flawed (hi dependancy hell), and YUM is only a bandaid on the solution. DEB is great, but only debian based distributions support it.

      With the availability of so many rpm frontends, how is it that this "rpm dependency hell" myth persists? And how praytell do you figure .deb files are any different than rpms? Listen real closely this time everyone. An .rpm file is basically the exa
    • OK who rated this 'interesting'?

      It's just a troll that posts the same damned thing in every story he can find.
    • 3) Alt-Tab. I don't care how yuo do it, but I want to be able to alt tab from a full screen graphical program to another graphical screen (not a console).

      Alt-Tab switches between X11 apps in Fedora. The behaviour is practically identical to Windows. I switch between full screen mplayer/ogle and apps like Evolution/Firefox all the time.

      Doesn't this work for you?

      Cheers
      Stor
  • Rather then posting on this topic, let's all do a virtual "sit-in" and just not respond to this posting! :)
  • Redhat has really screwed up with their ever changing strategy concerning their OS. They decide to ditch out on providing a free version of RH for none enterprise people. Then ditched out on supporting older versions and instead tell people to use the fedoralegacy project for security updates. Then the fedoralegacy project pretty much goes belly up. I have switched all my servers over to Debian and the last hold out will be switched when the current project ships in mid-summer.
    • I am using fedoralegacy. They were slow to get things moving at first but now they seem to provide updates reasonably fast. They did drop support for RedHat 7.2 and 8 due to lack of interest among the developers but they still are supporting 7.3 and 9 as well as Fedora Core 1 and 2.
  • However, that doesn't mean that I'm dead set against this split. I just want to be able to count on Red Hat sticking the best and most stable things that come up in the Fedora world into Red Hat. I also don't want to see a skill forking here where the two diverge so much that they become totally different distros and require doubling my learning load.

    I'm happy with FC3 as is, a lot of neat stuff still hasn't been ported from FC2 (./configure, make, make install, lather, rinse, repeat, nope no luck), and
  • I think this move by Red Hat is trying to lock-out free-as-in-beer Linux.

    Before I get modded down:
    -Red Hat will continue to contribute to Linux.

    -Red Hat will still promote most things good for Linux as in patents and other IP issues.

    I think they are becoming as proprietary as possible. For example, they recently open-sourced the Fedora Directory Project. http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page [redhat.com]

    I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way
    • I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way more value (to PHB's) in delivering point-and-click GUI admin than just foo.conf admin.

      If this was the case, then we should have seen, by now, major Linux vendors distributing closed source OpenLDAP, Samba, Apache, etc configuration tools.
    • The administration tools are already being released as open source. There is some proprietary code in there from Sun's iPlanet and a few other things that they aren't allowed to release. As a result, Red Hat engineers are spending the next few weeks rewriting the proprietary pieces and then releasing it. You don't give Red Hat enough credit, they are one of the few companies keepign open source moving foward.
      Regards,
      Steve

  • Red Hat is a company, people (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Monday June 06, 2005 @02:58PM (#12738870) Journal
    As a company, it serves its own best interests. It has always been honorable in doing so.

    You will not find Red Hat "stealing" OSS code, compiling it into proprietary work, and not telling anybody. You won't find them attempting to "extend" open code with proprietary extensions without releasing those extensions, too.

    They pay for a good, healthy staff of developers that work almost solely on GPL and otherwise released code. They release source binaries as though all their stuff was GPL, even with projects that are BSD-ish licensed.

    It's not that difficult to take their source RPMs and create your own "Enterprise Linux", as done by Scientific Linux [scientificlinux.org], Cent O/S [centos.org], and (my favorite) Whitebox Linux [whiteboxlinux.org].

    I don't like that they don't support good old "RedHat Linux" like they used to, but as a company, RedHat has been nothing but good for the community. If you choose to have a hissy, then enjoy your hissy, and move on to Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Ubuntu/Mandrake/Whatever/YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) to your heart's content.

    But, I see no sign that RedHat is doing anything evil at all.

  • When reading the headline, was I the only one who completed it as "Redhat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation ... at the other end of the galaxy"? Oh. Guess not.

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