Red Hat is changing course again with its free Fedora version of Linux, announcing Friday that it will turn over copyrights and development work to an outside entity called the Fedora Foundation.
Red Hat lets go of Fedora Linux
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“…and keep Red Hat at the center of open-source operating system work in the face of rivals such as Gentoo and OpenSolaris.”
The notion that Gentoo is a rival of Red Hat was new to me.
I believe RedHat considers its patents as defensive (it has them to keep others from getting them, and to keep itself out of patent litigation about prior art).
Calling people bigots isn’t going to seal your point or make your opinions seem valid.
@ds
The idea of working for free so some company can benefit is not for me.
News flash. Anyone who contributes to open source projects used by commercial distributions is doing the same thing. Since anything anyone contributes to RedHat is released back under the same terms any other person, company, etc. can benefit from it too.
I really hate it when people bash red hat. They have done more to promote the use of linux than 5 Debians and a dozen Ubuntus. Not that those distros arent fine, but really, bashing one distro over another is just plain stupid. RH puts a lot more code back into open source than most other groups using Linux. Sure they make money. They’re a business. But that doesnt make them evil.
@ds: Actually that is exactly what open source is supposed to do. Work you invest benefits EVERYBODY. NOt just the ones you agree with. If everyone thought like you there wouldnt be an open source community, everyone would be worried about themselves all the time.
So we get one paragraph that says
The company has spoken against software patents and permits its own patented technology to be used in any open-source project.
But then in the next paragraph…
We need to move away from a system of software patents compromised by trivial, incremental enhancements that block innovation to a system that is aimed at rewarding substantial innovation,” Webbink said in a statement. “Patents are not equal to innovation. More often, innovation occurs despite patents.
So RedHat is not against software patents, but just against the dumbass “one-click” crap that Amazon patented.
Come on your smarter than that. Maybe you are just anti Redhat. It is obvious that in Redhats case they are against patents. But given that patents exist they have some for defense, but have stated that anyone can use their patents in open source software.
I wouldn’t under-estimate the amount that Debian has contributed to Linux and Red Hat (e.g. yum/apt-get for RPM, which is central to Fedora was popularized by Debian, just as emerge was popularized by the xBSDs).
That being said, I agree, Red Hat (and the original Cygwin group which is now part of Red Hat), has been one of of the driving forces behind Linux’s success.
When you are going to speak publically, consult at least 200 other people to make sure your words can’t be skewed to mean something other than what you mean. The Titanium rule is to pray that the newspapers don’t screw up when they edit your words.
apt for RPM was done by Connectiva if I remember right. Second I dont see how these words can be skewed, they are letting Fedora stand on its own two legs, (think the Xbox team, and MS, the Xbox team is a stand alone project, but still uses the resources of MS, and is run under the MS corporation).
They counsulted with developers and this is what they wanted so here you go, now you have it, now start developing! I see this as a good thing for the Fedora Project, RH and for users in general.
This is just the next logical progression of the changes that were started in January with the opening of the Fedora CVS servers and the integration of Fedora extras.
I don’t see this as changing course, more like sticking to what they said in the very beginning. They always said that they wanted to have Fedora as a community project, but you had the critics saying it was just some underhanded trick by Red Hat to exploit OSS. Well.. I guess they shut the critics up now didn’t they.
>>The notion that Gentoo is a rival of Red Hat was new to me.
In the server market it is or for me it should be.
In the server market it is or for me it should be.
Totally different market segment, unless Gentoo happens to be dealing in enterprise class support contracts these days.
WOOT! now we can have mp3 added
Lol
Ha ha. We will soon see how indepedent it is when they attempt to add mono to fedora. Of course hell will freeze over before Red Hat supports mono so that will be the true test of its independence and you know what it just aint gonna happen cause red hat are the paymasters of fedora and therefore the puppet masters.
There will soon be a mpackage.org just like jpackage.org.
YUM wasn’t developed by Debian. If you check what it stands for you’d find it’s an acronym for Yellowdog Updator Modified: http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/solutions/ydl_general/yum.sht…
I agree. I think this announcement just benefits both Red Hat and Fedora Community. Heck, RHEL will still based on Fedora. Only people that have vendetta against Red Hat take it negatively.
It’s said SUSE want to build up a same open community of her own like Fedora .
Is that true?
I told you! It costs too much money to run a free OS without the company name on it (does not market the company).
Companies simply cannot have a truly open free linux distro without a catch. its not profitable and when it is it’s not stable profit. red hat only got profitable after they introduced a license that would not let you copy RHEL freely.
for real .. i didn’t understand anythning of this !
is that means redhat will get Fedora into business or it will continu free forever ?
i think they want put some comapny’s licnece into fedora , so we can now play mp3 (MPEG) and so ..
please help me to understand !!
tim, your way off. I will guarntee that rh devel’s will still be working on it, they will be using rh servers for build systems, mailing list, blah blah and blah. Copy RHEL freely, the src.rpm’s are still there and there are over a handful of rebuild distro’s out there, good try though.
Check this link out, it will come in handy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
First Red Hat is not changing course Fedora whas created so that public customer and there desktop platform could still be alive as Red Hat is concentrating on Corporation and server and service mostly.
Second Thats a good move ( not for GNU/Linux or the fedora community do ) by Red Hat , people are associating Fedora to Red Hat and its costing them sales. Now this way they can say its a free project that is supported by no one , buy our Red Hat product for real support.
Red Hat is a company that as got too much money invested in them for what they do today.
Mandriva for example never add as much money and even add some bad managements ( they still do Le Marois … ) but they have a better managing group and they never let go of there project and always support them ,even in hard time , not always in the best ways but its mostly due to financial.
Also Ubuntu wich is solely Mark Shuttleworth project is really innovative in there way to market , I dont think he invested 3.2 billion + in that project either.
In the Long run Red Hat will be shown to be a really bad investment , There IPO whas great , but there sales is really poor in term of ROI and they already have sold the profit on futur sale so the investor whont get the full benefit from that either.
Not that Red Hat dont do great things for GNU/Linux and Open Source , they just do it at a much more enormous cost then what they should.
Red Hat in my book is way overpriced as it is now , and sooner or later the investors will figure it out too and pull there money into more profitable GNU/Linux company.
Well it’s simple, if you run mission critical applications and you need Linux, you either chose RHEL or SUSE. I prefer RHEL but thats my personal opinion.
Running Fedora/Ubuntu/Gentoo is simply NOT a sollution; you don’t have official support for example. We don’t have much problems with RHEL but when we had them, RH solved them good and quickly.
Its my hope that Fedora is so open nobody can say a darn thing about how evil it is. If there was only a Fedora, Gentoo, and Debian Id be the happiest guy in the world. All serve a very different purpose do we really _need_ more distros than that?
SuSe, Redhat, Sun, etc could all fight over the enterprise I just want less fragmentation on our general purpose OS’s.
If you can’t afford RHEL, then use Debian for servers. If you want a general OS then its Fedora, If you want bleeding edge with a great tuning system use Gentoo. If you fall in a nitch like you some misc X feature compiled in by default don’t fork a whole distro for it, just use gentoo or work on adding it to Fedora/Debian. We are far too quick to fork a distro just cause it will make a name for its creator. And its costing us alot of talent.
Look at Ubunto for instance. This NASA guy is dumping millions into Ubunto for what? I mean Fedora is just as open its gnome centric it has an apt-get like tool the only differece worth a darn is the codec/mp3 stuff and slightly longer updates, but wouldn’t it have been easier to work on getting redhat to do what they just did in letting go of fedora so now we can gave codecs? Its a waste of money now we have two distro’s that do the exact same thing costing us twice the developers, and twice the money. In turn Ubunto users bash Fedora, and vice versa so nobody is really working together like they should.
This is not a Ubunto bash post I think its a great OS thing is so is Fedora. All that seperates them is maybe a couple version numbers and the supporting communites. Cant we just compromise and give up apt-get for yum, or giving up Bluecurve by default and deal with ‘Human’? We can’t have everything perfect just make sure we can change it if we need to , such like yum is default on fedora but apt-get is still there if you need it.
With this news Id like to see Ubunto and Fedora merge all that needs to be done is to finance fedora-legacy to ensure it has the same update length as Ubunto and there you go, the same OS with basically the same goals. i say basically cause everyone might need to compromise lil things for the greater good of both camps.
There is that small rumor that Microsoft wants to buy RedHat. I wonder if letting loose the reigns on Fedora is the first step. I can see the open source community saying “sure, RedHat is a Microsoft company now but we still have Fedora.” While I don’t believe the rumor, as someone mentioned above, RedHat “is a business” and “they make money” and what happens in business almost never surprises me.
There is that small rumor that Microsoft wants to buy RedHat. I wonder if letting loose the reigns on Fedora is the first step.
You can make speculation as a rumor. Just because there were a meeting between Microsoft and Red Hat, naysayers tend to exaggerate. The problem is the complete lack of understanding about Fedora.
I think further distancing themselves from Fedora is a good move. Netscape ended up spinning off the Mozilla Foundation, and look at how far its software has gone: Firefox and Tbird are eating away at MS’s pie. I know that the Fedora/RH situation is a bit different, but I think Fedora needs a little more freedom in its direction…and this move helps give it just that…
A side note about RH and SuSE being the only games in town for serious servers. I couldn’t disagree more… Debian Stable and Gentoo (stable, not ~arch) are powerful and solid distributions. An IT manager can choose to pay for support from RH or SuSE… or it can pay to hire a few resourceful/fluent Linux nerds to administer Debian/Gentoo/other… Stable packages are stable…and if they run into a problem, there’s very little that a Linux hacker can’t figure out on their own (especially with the aid of GOOGLE and an excellent community…which is what I love about these alternative distros)
Anywho…enough out of me. I’m happy to hear about this.
A normal firm bought several Dell PowerEdge servers for thir Oracle database needs.
They ordered the servers with service and RedHat Enteprise Linux. Everything looked OK. The tests was positive and everyone was happy. Then the machines started to die. No one knew why, but the machines was restarting them self under heavy load.
What to do? They had service agreement with Dell, Oracle and RedHat, but they did not find the problem at first.
How did they find the problem? RedHat put some of their best people on the case. They debuged the issue and found it.
What was the problem? A bug in the firmware on the SCSI controller Dell had in that version of the PowerEdge server. It was not a problem with linux, but with the SCSI card it self.
Who found the problem? Redhat.
What do they pay RedHat for? Help when they realy needs it.
-martin
Have anyone noticed how there’s been no announcement through the official Fedora channels about this? Let’s wait for the official announcement before we go all crazy about this.
has been delayed until 13 June…
Anyone know what the delay is?
According to Rahul from Red Hat, legality issue of codename to solve.