Red Hat Gives up on Fedora Foundation 295
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writes up Red Hat's giving up on the Fedora Foundation: 'In an open letter distributed to the Fedora community earlier this week, Red Hat employee and Fedora project leader Max Spevack states that Red Hat is no longer interested in establishing an autonomous, nonprofit foundation to manage the Fedora project. Instead, Red Hat will revive the Fedora Project Board, which will include five Red Hat representatives, four members of the Fedora community, and a chairman appointed by Red Hat who will possess veto power.'"
Reading the letter (Score:3, Interesting)
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
Re:Fedora/RedHat is dead (Score:5, Interesting)
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up. Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2, Interesting)
RHEL has some genuine advantages over most other distros, such as RHN's administration capabilities and guaranteed five-year support. Besides that, the Red Hat brand-name is invaluable, because people know them. They also have tons and tons of money in the bank, so they're far more reliable than Canonical.
In other words, for a company that signed its own death wish, they've been doing quite well lately, and have managed to outlast and survive their competitors. Maybe Ubuntu will be a serious competitor in the future, but they aren't right now.
-Erwos
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:3, Interesting)
What do you think is broken on it?
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:3, Interesting)
What does that tell you?
Re:Fedora/RedHat is dead (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh really? Seems to me that businesses love Redhat (and the clones like Whitebox) more for than everybody else put together. And Fedora Core is quite popular as well with the desktop user.
RedHat and similar companies (Mandrake or whateverthefuck it's called now, SUSE) have traditionally been the only large companies providing backing for Linux. Other companies like that support. This doesn't mean the distro is any good just because a business uses it.
Desktop users are all switching to Ubuntu. So while Fedora might be "quite popular" it ain't the cat's meow.
yum is very nice. Really, I never did understand why people hated rpm so much. Any sort of package management that also handles dependancies is going to add some complexity, and even then yum and the respositories makes it all pretty much automatic. I'm no rpm fanboy, but it does do it's job.
I didn't say yum's functionality sucked. I said it was slow as hell (ie. poorly written POS). I did say RPM sucked though and it does.
So, they picked a window manager by default that uses a lot of resources. So change it.
I didn't say anything about window managers. It's the distro specific stuff that sucks (boot time, package management).
Barely functional and ugly have nothing in common. And xfce seemed plenty functional to me, and plenty fast. (Of course, I'm still using fvwm as my window manager, the same window manager I used back when I had a 166 MHz box and probably even further back than that.)
Usability and look are often the same thing. Sorry if I wasn't clear but "ugly" to me means it has a bad feeling to it, it's hard to use or whatever. The functionality and look of FVWM or XFCE is crap. It works for sure, but it feels awful compared to a modern system (GNOME, KDE, Windows, OS X).
But you are right about one thing -- XP does work fine on my wife's 233 MHz laptop w/ 128 MB ram. I wouldn't say it screams, but it runs fine, and the only time she complained about the performance was when she put the Sims on it and it couldn't keep up.
I didn't say "Windows XP screams" I said it screams compared to most Linux distros. Make sure you read what others write before responding.
Of course, Fedora Core also works fine on the same laptop, even with the default gnome window manager, so maybe you just did something wrong.
Where did I say it wouldn't work smartass? I said it was slow as hell.
Re:The reason is very simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Fedora is not trying to be a desktop OS. If it was, flash, java and mp3 would ship out of the box.
Fedora is trying to be... something. I'll have to say that it makes a great distro for a home server. And it's got a pretty wide range of software for the intrepid.
My opinion is that Fedora is a workstation distro.
Re:Giving up on Fedora? (Score:5, Interesting)
> and don't want to give up control of it,...
(Copying from a blog post I made about this)
At first I was surprised that Red Hat finds it necessary to reserve ultimate control (veto power) over the Fedora project
Veto power? The OpenSolaris Charter certainly does not grant Sun veto power. But then as I read the message more carefully and thought about it, something hit me like a bolt.
First, some background: It's important to understand what exactly OpenSolaris is (and isn't). Unlike Fedora, OpenSolaris is purely a co-development project built around a code base. In other words, we do not conflate the OpenSolaris project/code with any of the distros derived from it. By contrast, Fedora is all three conflated into one: a) the Fedora co-development process b.) the Fedora code-base and c.) the Fedora distro.
How does this relate to community self-governance?
With OpenSolaris, one set of policies and procedures (the recently ratified OpenSolaris Charter) applies specifically to the co-development project and, by association, the code-base. This charter is community-driven. A separate set of policies and procedures applies to Solaris Express -- Sun's bi-weekly OpenSolaris based distro. This distro is Sun-driven and of course nobody objects to Sun controlling it because anyone can create their own OpenSolaris-based distro. (And as everybody knows, SchilliX, BeleniX, and Nexenta, have done exactly that.)
Maybe RedHat should adopt this concept? It certainly stands to reason that the Fedora community developers would like it better...
Eric Boutilier [sun.com]
OpenSolaris
Sun Microsystems
Re:One more reason to support Kubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Talk about a slanted summary (Score:1, Interesting)
It used to say you couldn't install more copies of RHEL than you paid for, and if you did and they audited you, which they had the right to do, then they could charge you for them plus an extra penalty.
The new EULA says you can, but they won't be supported. Big difference, and much better.
But for the year or so that the bad EULA was hanging out there, that sure didn't work to inspire community confidence in RH's committment to open source.
Re:The reason is very simple (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but I've written a lot of closed code that is no longer useful to anybody because the companies that owned it folded. The point is that we don't have to rely on any one company - or any commercial company at all, for that matter - to keep the FOSS coming and improving. It's nice that some companies can build a business model around it, but I'm certainly not depending on that.