Red Hat: Fedora will engage customers (News.com)

Posted Feb 21, 2005 22:58 UTC (Mon) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link]

Redhat was my third distribution (after SLS and Slackware) - it came at a time when I realised the need for package management (having run and been deeply involved with Linux for about 6-8 months), so its rpm tool was just what I needed. I was an avid advocate, regularly assisted folks on their mailing lists, I even managed to have a few packages I put together placed on their Contrib CD (that was a nice surprise)

Just before the release of Redhat 6 they were doing the sharemarket thing, it was the dot.com boom. The folks seemed rather busy touring the USA promoting their stuff, and also rather absent on the mailing lists wrt. support. For about 6 months. Then RH6 came out, and it was obvious they hadn't even bothered to look at the problems their packages had - things that were seriously broken and list members had provided unofficial packages for (some having been around for that 6 months) which basically everyone who needed that thing had to use, were still broken or broken worse. They put up a barrier between themselves and the people who had been providing free support for them while they were off at trade shows having a good time; treating them worse than problem users. It was quite obvious Redhat were not interested in their community and had no appreciation whatsoever for what people did for them; the almighty buck & corporate greed had taken over.

After being unable to communicate this problem to them despite numerous attempts with varying degrees of civility ;) I had to do what needed to be done; I had always wanted to try Debian anyway (I was, and still am in many respects, a distro junkie - I just love UNIX and UNIX-like systems ;) and the systems I had needed reinstalling so it was a perfect opportunity to switch. I discovered Debian had a far superior package management system, they had all the software I needed (I had been rolling my own RPMs for various things I needed that Redhat didn't provide) and then some, and they appreciated support. And *then* they came out with apt :) I discovered that I could install a system and it would work - I didn't have to rebuild things for library compatibility or to include config options that were required that Redhat hadn't seen fit to include, etc). I discovered I had more time to do the things I wanted and needed to do as opposed to waiting for packages to compile. And recompile when something required updating. And I never looked back.

There's already more Linux distributions than you can poke a stick at, nobody can truly afford to screw over their userbase like Redhat did, and I found their politics despicable; stacking the LSB so their distribution is the only one that conforms to the "standard", lying to upstream software maintainers about their desktop plans (we'll use Enlightenment, no, WindowMaker, wait no, sawfish) in order to distract those developers and give their own in-house software (metacity) time to be ready and be the actual WM they use, etc. I assume their evilness has finally caught up to their bottom line so they're actually interested in looking at the problem now. It's a shame they didn't listen all those years ago, they could have been leaps and bounds ahead of where they are now, but you know what they say about hindsight.

Lets all hope they continue to get it. Debian has stagnated because its had no real competition & they need a good kick up the pants.

PS: Branden for DPL!