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.'"
funny, (Score:4, Funny)
One more reason to support Kubuntu (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One more reason to support Kubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
Giving up on Fedora? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Giving up on Fedora? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Giving up on Fedora? (Score:4, Informative)
This was clearly stated in the open letter, despite Ars' flawed description.
RTFH? (Score:2)
People who don't read the article? Standard for Slashdot.
People who don't read the summary? Rare, but I can see it happening.
But people who don't read the headline? That seems silly, even for this place.
Re:Giving up on Fedora? (Score:2)
Re:Giving up on Fedora? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Corporate involvement (Score:2)
I dunno. PMD has certainly benefitted greatly from corporate involvement; the reason that the most recent release included support for checking JSP/JSF code [blogs.com] was that a corporate-sponsored developer put together a nice JavaCC grammar and did all the integration work.
As the project lead, I'm happy that PMD has new functionality and a larger audience, not least of all because that may lead to more book sales [pmdapplied.com]! One can but hope, anyhow.
Re:Corporate involvement (Score:2)
Fedora will never be a production OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Fedora will never be a fully functional production OS, for it's in the conflict with Red Hat's ability to sell its "enterprise" products.
For people who need a stable, secure, easy to maintain OS to run their production systems I would recommend Debian.
Fedora isn't *supposed* to be a production OS (Score:2)
Stability comes at the cost of lots of testing and debugging time. That's why a production-class OS like Debian or RHEL is always a bit behind in the software it includes.
If you like having the latest and greatest, and are willing to accept the risks that go along with that (there's a reason "cutting edge" became "bleeding edge," after
$DISTRO_FLAMEWAR_HEADLINE (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell? (Score:5, Funny)
My head hurts, time to go back to work and ignore all of this (right! [fak3r.com])
Re:What the hell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the hell? (Score:2)
Talk about a slanted summary (Score:5, Informative)
To say that the article writer has a bias against Redhat would be an understatement. Even when Redhat is transparent they are still lambasted. People want to hate Redhat, but without Redhat we would be much worse off in the Linux world. It's time people admit it.
Re:Talk about a slanted summary (Score:2)
I for one, dont see any reason to. They have supported a lot of projects and put a lot of effort into Fedora which is a great distro IMO.
Re:Talk about a slanted summary (Score:4, Informative)
It really is all about the support. RedHat is not that evil really, they contribute a lot of code to various open source projects. I think most peoples' beef with them is that they don't distribute a binary version of RHEL for free (source RPMs are of course available,) but you know what, the GPL says they don't have to. Get CentOS if you just want the OS, or get RedHat if you want the support. Or, if you just don't like RedHat as a distro, don't use it. Just don't expect a lot of proprietary stuff to support your distro (again with the support!)
We don't hate RedHat, we hate corporations (Score:2)
What are you, a man or a mouse? It's Redhat's trademark, they can do whatever the hell thay want. It's a free country, get off your ass and start your own distro, eveybody else has.
Re:Talk about a slanted summary (Score:2)
I hate getting into a bitch-fest here, but maybe if you had read the entire title of the post you were replying to:
Talk about a slanted summary
you would see that that was entirely not what the poster was talking about.
Reading the letter (Score:3, Interesting)
And bottom line, redhat has so far played well with the community.
They've played well with segments of the community (Score:2)
Other niggles: There is no support for the Pentium 2, 3 or 4 architectures. RPM is configured to reject anything with an arch above i686, you hav
RedHat / Fedora Are Not Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
If they aren't getting the benefit of that sponsorship by giving up control, then why give up that control? It's useful to keep Fedora in sync with their commercial product.
Besides, don't kid yourself, if I need a piece of software, more likely than not, it's been tested on Fedora, if not already packaged and included, and it was probably originally written on or ported to Fedora, so that's what makes it a great distro. I've used them all, and I like Fedora Core 5, and it's not terribly broken as others have claimed. (although I've seen one bug in the login screen).
There's nothing wrong with this. For efficiency, we're going to see more code shared between distributions, and possibly testing, etc. However, it looks like RedHat's hopes of becoming the absolutely dominant distribution by embracing and extending Ubuntu (which is part of Debian), or by aligning itself with IBM, have been put on hold for now.
However, the major distributions are more like one another than they ever have been (compare SuSE and RedHat now with SuSE 6.0 and RedHat 7.0), and they will continue to share more and more code, but it looks like the market for Linux based OSes is large enough that there is enough room to that total consolidation will not happen.
Re:RedHat / Fedora Are Not Dead (Score:2)
Moralistic Dogma (Score:4, Insightful)
This will actually be good for Redhat & Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Fedora Core is basically RHEL testing or unstable ( to try to fit the Debian nomenclature, I guess rawhide is unstable, FC is testing, RHEL is stable ), Redhat needs to be able to control where Fedora Core is going and what goes in. Partly to maintain quality control, partly to make sure Fedora goals incorporate the Redhat goals, partly for their legal department to not freak out.
Until another linux company becomes as central to linux in business as Redhat, what is good for Redhat is good for linux.
I think this will have limited impact for people who use Fedora Core as a home desktop (or even business). Probably none they will notice.
For those that use other distributions, this will have almost no impact, because the things they use in their distributions that Redhat contributes will still be high quality and GPL.
Re:This will actually be good for Redhat & Lin (Score:2)
The Debian nomenclature doesn't quite work as I originally indicated, but it is pretty close.
FC is closer to a test for RHEL than some people like to consider. A very polished, useable, great test.
Consider the following from the fedoraproject.org website:
"Why should I pay for
No problems here! (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked with several non-profits over the years, I can say from experience that a for-profit company will probably be more accountable and responsible, and better at "getting the job done".
We like being the "testing" arm of Red Hat. We get a free, open-source operating system, and Red Hat gets our bug fix submissions and feedback. It's a nice relationship. We also like that some of Red Hat's profits pay for developers to maintain different parts of our operating system. The end result is a very slick, easy to use, and easy to configure, multi-purpose operating system.
I am not so sure that a separate Fedora foundation would do as good a job as Red Hat is doing. Free software zealots will probably disagree, but guess what folks - it takes money and manpower to get things done. There's nothing wrong with a company making a healthy profit, and using some of that profit to give back to the community.
Should they have thought of this before? (Score:5, Informative)
"Incorporating as a non-profit foundation creates immense accounting challenges, and a truly independent Fedora Foundation would be forced to track the cost of bandwidth for distributing Fedora and every single hour of Red Hat developer time used to improve Fedora as well as the legal and administrative expenses associated with perpetuating the project and running the Foundation."
They are just realizing this now?
"In order to maintain non-profit status, a third of the Fedora Foundation's money would have to come directly from public sources. At present, Spevack argues, this just isn't feasible."
They are just realizing this now?
"Giving up" control of Fedora and then taking it back for the reasons listed just smacks of poor planning. Many people have argued "why should I help out Fedora why Red Hat just "takes" those changes and sells them in RHEL". I've always thought that was a retarded baseless argument. But on the other hand plenty of people seem to make that complaint. I don't think Red Hat is going to make many friends in the community by pulling Fedora even closer. I hope they are prepared to deal with the fallout and possible defection of contributors.
Re:Should they have thought of this before? (Score:2)
Although I agree with the poor planning bit, I think an even worse move for RedHat was killing off their des
Time to switch to debian ?? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is where a project like Debian gains significance. Since it is not funded or controlled by any corporation, it lives up to the philosophy guiding it and will not be swayed by market dynamics.
Tally the score... (Score:2)
Dirty Hippies: 0
Bad summary, bad article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bad summary, bad article (Score:2)
If you read the letter again, you should be able to understand the context. The stated purpose of the foundation was to provide an open patent commons. That was it. All of the other numbered items discussed were never goals of
link to text of Red Hat's letter (Score:2, Informative)
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2006-
Is There Any Actual Thinking Going On? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes I wonder how low the standards for nerdom has gone. Most top-level comments here are the same old "I don't like Fedora (I like so-and-so)" comments disguised to sound like there was a lot of wisdom in it. Heck, some don't even go to the trouble of making their comments look smart. Many of the RedHat/Fedora detractors either a) don't reference the actual article, or b) spout utter nonsense not even backed by passable facts (or both).
For goodness sake, could the nerds be smarter and make comments that are more constructive. Where's the intelligence? People just sound like whiners.
Re:Is There Any Actual Thinking Going On? (Score:2, Insightful)
Past 4 years of reading slashdot comments has really sucked. But what I disagree with is the notion that you think (or imply) that any given 'nerd' will be able to contribute anything at all to this discussion. Maybe just some open-minded critical users of RH/FC? As a RH/FC user for 7 years, I don't really have much
Re:Is There Any Actual Thinking Going On? (Score:2)
fedora = red hat enterprise beta (Score:2)
Business as usual... (Score:2)
Of course, for those who bothered to read RedHat's open letter, they will know that Fedora will continue to live on, "business as usual" as far as the average user is concerned. All that's changed is the organisational/support structur
Re:Red Hat... (Score:5, Insightful)
Name one.
Seriously and with no hand-waving, name one action where Red Hat's actions were "nonconducive to the open source ideal." Back it up with WHY it is what you claim it is. You are going to have a tough time.
Re:Red Hat... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2)
Okay, they aren't Linux, but Cygwin is fantastic for a unix geek stuck on Windows, and while I haven't had occasion to need or try eCos it sounds like a really nifty project.
I dislike *using* RedHat OS'es because I don't like their admin tools (don't get along with hand-editing; don't seem to do what I want quickly) or their package manager (too much dependency hell) I have no problem with the company and am glad it's giving so much code to the community.
Use yum/Up2Date instead of rpm (Score:3, Informative)
You are either basing that on five year old experiences (which were horrible, I was there too) or not using the right tool for the job. These days only real propeller spinners need to manually invoke rpm. Up2Date and Yum take all the dependecy hell out of package manangement. Using rpm manually in this day would make about as much sense as a Debian user using dpkg manually instead of apt-get.
And no, apt-get isn't the answer despite people contin
I know! (Score:2, Funny)
Name one.
They make money off of F/OSS! They're supposed to do everytyhing for free! They're just some corporation with their CEOs sitting in their offices being all corporaty and stuff!
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2, Insightful)
I used their products from the 6.x days to 9.0, Enterprise Server 2.x, and Fedora 4. I was mostly happy with them, and was willing to give them a chance after they split off Fedora from mainline Redhat. I then switched jobs to a FreeBSD shop, and I've been a convert ever since, from my workstation at the office to my home machines. The base system is a high performer and stable, and the ports tree is well maintained and much better than RPMs ever were.
After recently try
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2, Insightful)
One vendor for a software system I work at stick to Redhat/fedora. Why they never went with debian I'll never
Re:Red Hat... (Score:3, Informative)
The last time I went through rpm hell was in the days of Redhat 7 or 8. apt-4-rpm and yum have completely eliminated rpm hell for years now.
Re:Red Hat... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2)
I decided that Fedora has gone beyond bloated and sucky, and that if I were to ever prefessionally [sic] recommend any Linux flavors, they'd be Gentoo and the free Redhat Enterprise clones (Whitebox, etc.).
I am only guessing by professional, you mean business. So let me get this straight--you are looking to professionally recommend a Linux distro and you are complaining about a distro that is openly NOT a professional distro not being professioinal enough. How does that ma
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2)
These numbers beg to differ [yahoo.com]. People have a habit of projecting their personal opinions, or what might work for an enthusiast desktop/server, on the rest of the professional world. In fact, the professional Linux world has pretty much two players: Red Hat and Novell, and despite what Distrowatch rankings might imply, Red Hat has been consolidating its lead.
Don't be an ass (Score:2)
Re:Don't be an ass (Score:2)
We're deploying a completely new server cluster based upon FC4 because all the tools and various things that come with the distribution.
This also gives us the ability to "upgrade" to RHEL if we ever need major support.
I certainly have some criticisms: FC can be a little bloatish and yum isn't as good as apt (so install APT for RPM
Re:Don't be an ass (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Red Hat... (Score:2)
Re:First. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing that just can't happen in open source is to get so many diversified projects to run together nicely - it is not the nature of open source. Not that any one piece is bad on it's own - there is just no single entity accountable for getting them all together
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like your'e trolling, though. I mean, the problem you describe is related to the kernel only. How can that say anything about FLOSS' ability to coopoerate and "run together nicely"?
Examples of open source "running nice togehter" include jack [sourceforge.net] with applications like Hydrogen and Ardour, or media codecs like OGG and FLAC with media players (like XMMS).
In areas where a defined protocol or standard exists, open source excels. I mea
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2)
I can only imagine 3 possibilities:
* You live in a fairy land I have no access to
* You have no experience with MS software
* You are a paid MS astroturfer
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2)
On their website, OpenNMS offers downloads for the following OSes: [sourceforge.net]
CentOS 3, 4: rpm
Debian Woody, Sarge, Sid: deb
Fedora Core 1-10: rpm
Mandrake 8, 9.2, 10: rpm
RedHat 7-9, RHEL 3, 4: rpm
Solaris 8, 9, 10: gz
SuSE 8, 9, 10: rpm
Plus source in tar.gz
I find that actually pr
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2)
Maybe it's just me, but it sounds like you should stop using a Red Hat-based distribution and switch to a Debian-based distribution. Debian takes on the accountability for thorough testing and package integration, and they have years worth of experience with open betas.
Re:If this is a reaction to the terminally flawed (Score:2)
No, [debian.de] you [redhat.com] surely [ubuntu.com] can't [opensuse.org]
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, Informative)
So yes, they are relevant. Software is written with RH in mind. It might work on other systems, but the target system is RH.
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:2, Insightful)
RedHat is making enterprise quality Linux distribution, i.e. carefully designed, thoroughly tested, and planed support for 5+ years.
Running Linux just for the sake of running Linux is not cool any more. People use Linux to actually get something done. Linux-based projects nowdays spawn for well over 5 years, and they require a solid OS provider.
Fedora is really just a playground. RHEL or CentOS builds of RHEL are a lot more interesting.
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:2, Redundant)
Yes.
Red Hat is actually making money from Linux. Why is that relevant? Because they are PAYING people to enhance Linux.
The have spent large sums of money on GCC, Gnome, X.org, and Xen.
Look at the things they have written and maintain and or contributed to.
cairo
glib
gtk+
dbus
LVM2
ext3
gfs and gfs2
JFFS2
SELinux
RedHat has made money from OSS and has put money back into OSS. They are not my distro of choice but they have become one of the business frie
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:2)
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:3, Interesting)
What does that tell you?
Re:Question for Red Hat guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why not use another more solid OS? (Score:2)
Re:Why not use another more solid OS? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Why not use another more solid OS? (Score:2)
Re:Why not use another more solid OS? (Score:2)
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:Fedora/RedHat is dead (Score:2)
Indeed. Even the trolls can't keep track of what they said.
I didn't say the `distro was any good'. I was countering the poorly thought out `I'm sorry but everything is Ubuntu nowadays' claim you made.
Sorry, but NOT everything is Ubuntu nowadays. Sure, it might be growing rapidly, and might be the most popular distribution now,
Desktops/Servers are a small part of world (Score:2)
Desktops and servers are a small part of the world, numerically they are dwarfed by embedded and other small scale devices. Now you may not find an old pentium in many of these devices but you will find some, and probably more that Sparc, Alpha, and other "mainstream" server CPUs that receive Linux support. I did a quick google of single board computers and I was finding 386 based solutions. I'm having flashbacks to an embedded kernel development job in 1
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2, Interesting)
RHEL has some genuine advantages over most other distr
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2, Informative)
Man, that's got to be the longest week ever. I remember reading the same thing 50 weeks ago, when I was making the switch from Fedora to Ubuntu.
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:4, Informative)
You must not know many people who actually work in corporate environments then. Most third party apps, such as Oracle, are only certified to run on RHEL or SUSE Enterprise. No other distrobution is certified. I can tell you first hand that if you're running Oracle on an unsupported platform, you will get ZERO support from them.
Really.
Try and sell that to your management.
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:3, Informative)
RedHat, on the other hand, has t
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2)
And so are many of us. That's how Windows made it into the workplace, everyone already knew it from home. If there were only more games for Ubuntu it's enterprise future would be certain.
Corporate trickledown, not trickleup. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Windows became the standard home OS because it was the standard business OS, and it became that because of the partnership between IBM and MS. A lot of people who had the money to buy PCs when they were new (and far more expensive than they are now, relatively) went out and bought Compaq clones of the machines they were familiar with at the office.
If what you say is true, than the Apple II would have become the enterprise standard microcomputer, because it was pra
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/db2cert [ubuntu.com]
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2)
Re:When redhat dropped the desktop market (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Redhat Abondons me? (Score:2, Informative)
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Fedora Core the distribution, this is about the Fedora Foundation, a non-profit corporation Red Hat setup for various reasons. It proved unwieldy and not worth the hassle so they shut it down.
This does not affect Fedora Core, you and other Fedora Core users have not been abandoned.
Re:Redhat Abondons me? (Score:2)
You're still using Red Hat.
Re:Redhat Abondons me? (Score:2)
2. CentOS works just like Red Hat because it's literally a clone of Red Hat. They take the open source RPMS from RHEL, remove or replace anything trademarked or non-redistributable, point updates to their own servers and rebuild. The result is a Linux distro with the same structure, library versions and software set as RHEL.
The reason Red Hat isn't mentioned by name on
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:The reason is very simple (Score:2)
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible. It was impossible 11 or 12 years ago, when I first started using Slackware Linux, it was impossible 3 years ago, when I finally wiped the Windows partition off of my last dual-boot machine, and it's impossible now that I'm running FC4 exc
Re:The reason is very simple (Score:2)
I just love it when the MS astroturfers around here (ACs all) tell me that the world I live, breathe, and work in every day is simply not possible."
Are you in fact a commercial company that has been giving away your products for free for several decades?
The previous post's claim was that devoting R&D money to deveoping products that you give away for free is an unsustainable long
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.
Re:Par for the course... (Score:2)
As you say you "wouldn't look for anything free from Red Hat," it sounds like you think they've discontinued Fedora Core. This, in turn, implies that you have yet to read the entire headline (never mind the summary or the article).
Re:Par for the course... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the other motivations behind the Fedora Foundation was for legal standing. Just like the FSF makes contributors sign over their rights so that there is one entity in control of all the copyrights, the Fedora Foundation was going to serve that purpose for Fedora. The problem being that the Fedora Documentation is released under a very liberal license, no sense on signing over there, the Core and Extra repositories are collections of projects coded by other entities (such as Red Hat, Novell, or individual contributors), so standing doesn't make sense there, and for specific Fedora projects like the Fedora Directory Server, Red Hat bought and open sourced all of that source code so Red Hat has the standing for the time being. There is no purpose for starting the Fedora Foundation to cover legal issues like "standing" because it is a non-issue for Fedora right now. Fedora has access to all of Red Hat's lawyers, but as a separate foundation, they'd need to fund their own lawyers and track many other expenses. Just because its non-profit doesn't mean those problems go away.
And this one was the real killer, a non-profit needs to have 33% of its revenue come from public donations (thats how you prove you're benfitting the public). Red Hat dumps a ton of money into Fedora, but here is an excerpt of things they'd have to track from the email:
To sum it up, Red Hat wants to keep dumping more money into Fedora to make it even better, but if the Fedora Foundation was created then every dollar Red Hat put into Fedora would be another 30 cents that needs to be raised through charitable donations. Essentially, putting more money into t
Re:What is the problem? (Score:2)
As for the general public who don't really care for Fedora or would like to see Fedora die (most likely
Re:"Eat your brain!" (Score:2)
Right here [literalbarrage.org].
[/shameless self-promotion]
Re:Typical (Score:2)