Self-described Kubuntu user? [LWN.net]

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 14:10 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563)
In reply to: Self-described Kubuntu user? by mingo
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

Are you perhaps the same Ajross (Alistair Ross) as the one here?

No. My name is Andy Ross. I was a Slackware user 1993-1997, when I switched to Red Hat which I used and recommended exclusively up until about a year ago. My last Fedora installation was replaced just about a month ago, when I bought a new laptop running Dapper.

I'm not sure why that's important, but if you're going to point out "amusing" ad hominems, you might as well do it about the right person.

And, as for Seth and Dave's defense: you guys are great. You do good work, and the Red Hat money paying your salaries is well spent and an excellent way to give back to the community. But your bosses don't get it. I'm sorry, but they don't. And at this point, I think it's driven the final nail into the coffin for me. I won't be using Fedora anymore, nor recommending Red Hat as a platform choice.

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Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 14:27 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

Umm. I don't work for red hat.

That subject has been broached a number of times and the answer is always the same for me:

I can do a lot more for fedora outside of red hat.

red hat's never paid me for anything. I've never even accepted a flight anywhere.

-sv

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 14:51 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

I don't work for red hat.

My apologies. I just assumed. I'm not sure how that changes the argument, though. I mean, the hypothetical here is that Red Hat might be considering (at some point in the nebulous future) the possibility of taking your software and releasing it in a distribution that isn't usable* by the community. Is that OK with you? Maybe it is. It certainly wouldn't be with me, and it doesn't seem very nice.

My problem here isn't that Red Hat is doing something evil right now. It's that they seem to have become confused about what evil means in the open source world. Perceiving the community distribution as somehow in competition with the enterprise distro for development dollars is exactly that: it tells me that they just simply don't understand their obligation (yes, obligation: they didn't write the software, they got it from us) to give back in exchange for what they received.

That is "evil", in the milder Google sense of the word. And I'll be frank: it has driven me away from the distribution and toward ones that don't share the same cynicism. I suspect I am not alone. Remember that the reason that Red Hat "won" against all the other commercial linux distributions was user mindshare; and that mindshare owed almost exclusively to the fact that Red Hat was always freely available to the community. I suspect current management has forgotten.

* SRPM trolls: please don't. Sure you can compile your own distro; you can do that from the raw sources, too. But claiming that making source code available without an install image is the same thing as "giving back to the community" is ridiculous on its face.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 15:01 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

One - no one is asking you to rebuild your own srpms. You can let the centos project do that for you. Which is what I do.

Oh and just for the record: The work we did on fedora in terms of changing the packaging tools, etc has changed how rhel gets updated for the future.

That echoes down the line, making centos rebuilds easier and making my job simpler all around.

I'm all for freedom. This means the freedom of rh to take code that I wrote and use it in their best interest. The only trick is that they have to release their code back. And they do. How much more could I ask of them?

-sv

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 15:20 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

How much more could I ask of them?

I, for one, would ask them to release back the product (the whole, not the bits & pieces) that they created with it, so that I might use it, know it, and recommend it to my friends. This is not required by typical licenses, but it is fair. This is the policy of community-based distributions like Debian and Gentoo. It is the policy of Ubuntu also, who don't play such games with release management.

And, most frustratingly, it used to be the policy of Red Hat, and one of the reasons I used and recommended their distribution exclusively for something like eight years. Even when Fedora was split off and RHEL was firewalled as "open, but not freely available from Red Hat" I continued to use it, because I believed in their commitment to the community.

But today, I read in the above article that even the "community" distribution, which so far continues to be freely available, needs to justify (justify!) its existence to upper management. Sorry, but that's the end for me. If you were the only distribution around (or even clearly the best), I would be more tolerant. But you just aren't, sorry. There are better options.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 15:29 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

This isnt about the existence of Fedora or not. This is about understanding more metrics to increase the Red Hat funds on Fedora.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 15:36 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

Please read the rest of the thread, and my posts specifically. I believe I have been very clear about what I mean throughout. Adding one-liner posts to long flame wars like this only cheapens the discussion and gets us side tracked on correction posts like this one. And yes, I realize I am breaking my own rule with this post. :)

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:23 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Clarifying a claim that discussion isnt about the justification of the need of Fedora doesnt cheapen the discussion in anyway. Red Hat has already said that it will continue to support a free distribution as recently as https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2006...

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:44 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

Red Hat has already said that it will continue to support a free distribution [...]

This claim is clearly contradicted, in spirit at least, by the quote I referenced all the way up at the top of this thread. Maintaining a token "community distribution" is largely meaningless if your development resources are being spent on the "non-community" version instead. Thus, my rant.

Sure, many people don't care about this distinction and will continue to use Fedora anyway. But I care. And, as a long-term and formerly loyal user, I thought folks might be interested in why I have abandoned Red Hat. To my eyes, they have simply lost their way. It strikes me that Red Hat's management doesn't understand that Shuttleworth and the folks at Canonical are eating their lunch in the mindshare wars. This kind of thinking is why.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:52 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The contradiction seems to be from your misunderstanding. This is what I have been trying to get across to you. The quote you referenced above was in a discussion related to getting MORE funds alloted to Fedora than what is being currently spend on it.

Red Hat does spend a lot of money in Fedora already. The announcement regarding the foundation explained some of this. More information is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Accounting

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 21:18 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> I'm not sure how that changes the argument, though. I mean, the hypothetical here is that Red Hat might be considering (at some point in the nebulous future) the possibility of taking your software and releasing it in a distribution that isn't usable* by the community. Is that OK with you?

> * SRPM trolls: please don't. Sure you can compile your own distro; you can do that from the raw sources, too. But claiming that making source code available without an install image is the same thing as "giving back to the community" is ridiculous on its face.

I guess you're referring to me here, as I was the one pointing out the SRPMS.

First, thanks for the name calling. Really appreciate it.

Second, yes, it's OK because the distro is usable. It is usable by downloading an eval set of (mostly up to date) binary ISOs. It is also usable by downloading CentOS and other similar distros.

Under what theory are Red Hat obligated to provide endless updates (and therefore support) to non-paying "customers"? If Canonical want to do that - well, it's their choice (we'll see how it works out when the cash runs out). Doesn't change anything about Red Hat and their commitment to FOSS.

This baseless, supposedly "morally superior" Red Hat whining is really becoming annoying.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 21:35 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

That's precisely what everyone said about Red Hat in the late 90's. "They're too free." "There's no business model." "You can't make money on goodwill." Red Hat crushed everyone else. Now they are everyone else, and rapidly losing to Ubuntu. Just as nothing legally obligates Red Hat to make their distribution directly available to the community, nothing obligates the user community to care about a distro they can't meaningfully use.

Here's a concrete example: I work at a company with a product that runs, almost exclusively, on RHEL. That's what the customers are running, so that's what we deploy on. Guess how many of the developers are using RHEL (or even RHEL clones) on their desktop machines? Zero. I was the last Fedora holdout (mostly for the very robust amd64 multilib support), and I switched over to Ubuntu a month ago when I got a new box and discovered Dapper multilib to be acceptable. So I ask you: is RHEL a dominant player or just a legacy platform?

I apologize for calling you a troll, by the way. I just fail to see how you can claim, with a straight face, that the source code availability of RHEL is morally the same as providing an installable OS. The abundantly transparent purpose behind making RHEL install images "purchase only" is quite obviously to prevent the community from "freeloading" and encourage corporate users to buy licenses instead of using "unofficial" distros like Centos. I find that insulting, frankly. And I find your insensitivity to that fact puzzling.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 0:23 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> So I ask you: is RHEL a dominant player or just a legacy platform?

Who cares. Whatever they make of their destiny as a company is their choice. If it turns out that Canonical business model is better, so be it.

Doesn't make RHEL any more or less free.

> I just fail to see how you can claim, with a straight face, that the source code availability of RHEL is morally the same as providing an installable OS.

How about you provide engineers, machines, offices and bandwidth for a free, fully supported community distro which will be timely updated for at least 5 years? Well, unless you're Mark Shuttleworth and have millions to throw around, you'll find it hard to run a successful business out of that.

Red Hat aren't even obligated to provide those RHEL source RPMS to you and me, unless they supplied the binaries to us. And yet, they do. And yet, there is CentOS (and others) that build the whole lot - but you get no paid-for support. Seems very fair and moral to me.

And please don't ignore the fact that you can download installable RHEL *now*, if you so wish and straight from RH. However, if you want timely updates (i.e. support), you have to pay. If they go broke as a result of it, it's their call to make, but what they are doing will be no more or less moral.

> The abundantly transparent purpose behind making RHEL install images "purchase only" is quite obviously to prevent the community from "freeloading" and encourage corporate users to buy licenses instead of using "unofficial" distros like Centos.

I'll be a nitpick here and I'll point out that they are not licences - they are support subscriptions. It is a contract between RH and you about provision of support.

Anyway, yes and so what? Red Hat want to make money (those corporate bastards - all of them :-) and in the process they are financing FOSS. Big deal.

> I find that insulting, frankly.

Oh, come on. Red Hat insulted you by not giving you *more stuff* free of charge?

I'm guessing your argument is probably that they are taking all this software from the community, therefore they are morally obligated to provide it to the community both as binaries and source. Well, you can find all those community codes out there - no need to get them from Red Hat. And it's not like Red Hat is a black hole into which the code disappears.

They haven't taken anything away from anyone. In fact, they contributed *a lot*. So, the moral obligation is on all of us to say thank you, as we already received plenty from them. We don't get to tell them that they have to give us more gifts. That's rude.

>And I find your insensitivity to that fact puzzling.

I'm an old bastard and the thickness of my skin grows daily :-)

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 18:14 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

How about you provide engineers, machines, offices and bandwidth for a free, fully supported community distro which will be timely updated for at least 5 years?

Red Hat used to do exactly this, of course. And they kicked serious ass and made a lot of money. A few years ago they stopped doing it and now they kick far less ass and seem to be worried about money. Is there a connection? Who knows?

All businesses require investment to get started. You appear skeptical that Canonical will ever make money off Ubuntu... Personally, I would buy their stock if I could. Until I can, I'll just submit bugfixes and patches.

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 21:58 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Red Hat used to do exactly this, of course. And they kicked serious ass and made a lot of money.

Apparently not: http://lwn.net/Articles/204238/. This is from a person that actually worked there in those days.

> A few years ago they stopped doing it and now they kick far less ass and seem to be worried about money.

I think that's not correct. Red Hat are making more money now than they ever did. Of course they are "worried" about money. That's what companies do - it is the main purpose of their existence.

> All businesses require investment to get started. You appear skeptical that Canonical will ever make money off Ubuntu...

I'm just saying I don't know. In the beginning, when the cash is abundant, things are always easy. We'll see what happens later if/when Mark's cash runs out. Obviously, I haven't seen their books, so I don't know how much money is coming in or going out.