On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 03:05:41PM +0100, Adrian von Bidder wrote: > I get a weird feeling reading this ZDNews article... > > <http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5534343.html> There's some ripper quotes in there: "Red Hat couldn't accept much beyond simple bug reports" (from a RedHat guy) I'd ask "why the hell not?". It's not as though it's hard to give some random outsider some level of access to maintain a package, even if every upload has to go through some RedHat QA checker -- they're paying people, they can do that. You have to work to build a community, but if all the community can do is file bug reports, then you're screwed. "Red Hat has opened up the source code repository--governed by software called Concurrent Version System, or CVS--so outsiders can see the latest software that's in the works." Does this mean that, up until now, Fedora hasn't had an equivalent of Debian sid to be able to dogfood the latest and greatest? Fark, no wonder no outsiders could get involved in developing the damn thing... > RedHat: are they - again - trying to duplicate Debian (and other community > driven projects)? Fedora Extra --> something like apt-get.org, or a mix > between that and contrib? Allowing outsiders to get patches into Fedora? No, extras looks like Ubuntu Universe, or Debian's "everything outside base". I think it's closer to Ubuntu Universe, myself -- there's a pile of stuff that RH will keep close grasp on, and will just let the scraps fall where they may (in Extras). It's not the way to build a community distro. People are going to want to have a solid say in the way that the Core develops, and RedHat aren't going to want to let that happen if Fedora is (as has been suggested) nothing more than an unstable staging ground for what goes into RHEL. > I really wonder if RedHat wouldn't be better off by just switching to being > a Debian-based distribution - they'd have their community here, and RH has > the manpower to enhance Debian enough to sell it as a product of their > own... I think the way Ubuntu is doing it is a much better model than RedHat's, but then again, it looks like the goals of RedHat and Ubuntu are very different. RedHat has a particular way of doing things -- often very different from the rest of the Linux world, and often not for the best. (network config files, anyone?) They need to keep some level of compatibility between RHEL and Fedora, since the latter is a testbed for the former, and they can't keep compatibility if some outsiders (with their own views of What's Right) is running the Fedora show. As long as Fedora is in *any* way beholden to RedHat's corporate interests, Fedora will not achieve it's full potential. And I think there's a lot there. It's a distro with a lot of potential users, from Corporates who don't want to fork out for RHEL on every machine they've got, to all of the home users who've grown up with RedHat but can't afford RHEL. A lot of those people will get involved in some way if they can. But I guess RedHat can't afford for the community distro to even look as though it's as good as RHEL, otherwise they'll lose massive mindshare, and then all they've got to sell is hardware and ISV certification -- which, hopefully, will slowly go the way of the dodo. I love the name of the upcoming Fedora conference -- FUDcon. I wonder if it's sponsored by Microsoft? - Matt
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature