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Red Hat ponders new JBoss strategy (ZDNet)
ZDNet reports
that Red Hat may split JBoss into a free, unsupported product and a
subscription-based supported one. "Currently, there is a single
version of JBoss, and Red Hat has sold support for it since acquiring the
company behind it in April. But Chief Financial Officer Charlie Peters,
speaking at a UBS financial conference Tuesday, said that the company is
considering applying the two-version formula it used to profit from
Linux."
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Fool me once? Posted Nov 17, 2006 20:04 UTC (Fri) by justme (guest, #19967) [Link] Do they really think that their Fedora strategy was that successful? I mean, it may have helped turn RHEL into a cash cow, but in the process, Red Hat's community distribution was weakened enough to be later supplanted by Ubuntu in popularity. Haven't they reconsidered the long-term effects of alienating the community?
Fool me once? Posted Nov 17, 2006 21:58 UTC (Fri) by ericc72 (guest, #41737) [Link] I may be wrong, and I am no Linux expert, but Ubuntu does something real nice that Fedora as far as I know has never done: It gives a nice clean simple install with just a single CD worth of packages. Fedora gives you the kitchen sink and creates complexity by this just due to the nature of it.
With Ubuntu, you are an apt-get away from what you need. If Fedora could create a single, nice and simple, one CD install and not turn on every darn service by default, and let you pick what you want via a yum, then hey that would be cool.
That is my opinion at least.
Fool me once? Posted Nov 17, 2006 22:09 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The problem with Fedora is not the installer. Backlash started with RedHat 9 - before Fedora. Before that "RedHat Linux x.0" was experimental while "RedHat Linux x.2" (or in some cases "RedHat Linux x.3") was quite usable for wide usage. No formal support - but it was tested and true. RedHat 8.0 and later RedHat 9 were both experimental and the only way to get stable plaform was to buy RHEL. Fedora is one endless experiment - and if you want something stable then you'll need to buy RHEL (or download CentOS). If the JBoss will to have two versions: flaky experimental one (free) and stable (for subscribers only) - then we'll have the repeat of the Fedora story. If the "unsupported product" will work Ok (may be without some features available in subscription-based version, but without problems in basic functionality) - it'll be accepted just fine...
it depends on what you want Posted Nov 17, 2006 23:37 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Fedora Core works well for me at home. You get code that's as new as what Debian unstable provides (often newer, particularly for the kernel) and it breaks a lot less often. If you want a highly stable server, it's not the right choice.
Fool me once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 1:07 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] The problem I have with Fedora is twofold:
First:
Otherwise you simply are going to break things. There is no way around it. I can't beleive some of the things they do.
Second:
I tried using FC for a while, but when upgrading to FC4 there was simply no third party support for software packages. They pretty much driven away other repos. It was pretty bad.
I don't know if it got better after that or not because I simply stopped using it. I use Debian now.. I just didn't have time to deal with FC brain-dead-ness. At work a couple of the admins and such were always big Redhat fans. They use Fedora Core on their desktops and I can tell they are getting frustrated with breakage and such. Neither of them have bothered upgrading to latest versions of Fedora.
Personally I couldn't give a shit about the installer. Typically when I install Debian I don't even use their installer, I'll just use debootstrap because it's more convient to use whatever live-cd rather then downloading and burning a new disk. I only want to deal with the installer _once_. After that who cares?
I also don't care about mp3 support or dvd support or quicktime or wmv support. I can install support for that onto FC just like I would have to do with Windows or OS X.
What realy matters is stuff what is the likelihood of me being able to do my work after I install the latest security patches, with FC it's much less likely to actually work afterwords then with other distros.
FC needs to stop worring about competiting with Ubuntu. They need to concentrate on stability. (I don't care if it's bleeding edge or not. they can do a better job)
The way Ubuntu is going then it's going to lose it's Rock Star status within the year. They are installing random drivers, heavily patching the kernel, installing propriatory drivers by default. That's a nice way to kiss your stability and security good bye.
You know what I would do if I was in charge of Fedora? I would work on porting all the cool stuff I want to work on to Debian Testing/Unstable and work on improving Debian's RPM format support. Port stateless linux, SELinux, Clustering software support, Fedora directory services, and other cool things over to Debian.
That way Fedora can concentrate on what it does best, which is push the state of the art in terms of Free software technology and stop wasting time trying to stabilise their own distro. Selinux and other things will progress much faster that way. Concentrate on what you do best and delegate responsability for things that your not so hot with to somebody else who can do a good job.
Also users get to have great software support and good security updates and such.
Maybe it's time to quit trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to distros. Linux distributions are less and less interesting. Rather it it was you can do in terms of desktop usability, virtualization, and server/storage clustering is what is most interesting in Linux nowadays.
Fool me once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 4:58 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] "Them doing things like having a huge X upgrade halfway through the life of a release."
When did Fedora upgrade X in between a release?
Fool me once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 5:41 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] My bad.I thought FC5 did Xorg 7.0 to 7.1
Still though you have to admit they do a lot of churn after a release.
Installing FC from one CD? Posted Nov 18, 2006 1:04 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] While I haven't tried it with FC6, it should also work (I've done it with CentOS as well as earlier FCs)... but you CAN install Fedora Core from 1 CD. Just customize the package set and unselect everything... which is the equivalent of a minimal install... which should only require CD1.
It takes just a few minutes to install (about 600MB of packages?)... and when you boot up for the first time, you only have a text-based system... but from there you can use yum to install whatever else you want. Installing individual packages by package name would be a pain... but luckily there are package groups you can call by name to easily install large package sets.
Now, having said all of that... I really don't recommend doing it... but I did want to point out that it could be done.
Also, please note that the Fedora folks created a survey a while back to see what Fedora users wanted... and reducing the system to a single CD install as well as free disk shipping (sounds very Ubuntu like, eh?) were both on the survey. I took the survey but I don't think I ever made it back to see the survey results. My guess is that the Fedora community saw those two features as lower on the list than some other things... but I'm just speculating. Surely you don't think that every distro should adopt a single CD approach?
I do a lot of installs on a lot of machines (of several different distros)... and I prefer the DVD approach where I can install a large software set easily.
For groups of machines I set up one machine just the way I want it and then rsync it (excluding /dev, /proc, /sys, /mnt and /tmp) to a storage machine... and call it my "golden rsync directory". The golden image may vary from one with all of the verboten codecs, Acrobat Reader, Flash, propretary video drivers, tons of additional packages (Extras, whatever)... or it might just be a developers machine with every programming language and devel package there is. Whatever.
Then I do a minimal install on a target machine (takes like 5 minutes) from a single CD... and then I rsync that machine into the machine I want with something like:
rsync -avSH --delete --exclude=/dev --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/tmp --exclude=/etc/sysconfig/network --exclude=/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 root@remotesystem:/path/to/golden-rsync-directory /
Works like a charm as does partimage/partimaged (for machines with the same hard drives).
Why do I bring up all of these details... well, just to point out that ther e are a large number of different needs and wants from a distro... and targeting the "single CD download with a very limited set of packages that work well" by Fedora would be a big mistake.
Red Hat recently release RHEL 5 Beta 2 and it includes a lot of technologies you can't find anywhere else (that costs a fortune for the big business targets it serves). Red Hat made a good choice by going after those with deep pockets and serving them well (as has Novell). It is also believed that they will also market RHEL 5 to end-user desktops (not just business desktops) but we'll see how that goes. For the time being, for a cutting edge desktop, I still prefer Fedora... but what you choose for yourself doesn't bother me a bit.
Installing FC from one CD? Posted Nov 20, 2006 5:43 UTC (Mon) by ericc72 (guest, #41737) [Link] Good point on the single CD issue. Made me think a litter deeper about my original comment.
Fool you once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 0:35 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] Critisizing my favorite Linux distro (Fedora Core for personal desktop use anyway)... is akin to calling my children bad names. Grow up. Software freedom has little relation to popularity.
While I considered bad mouthing your kids, I decided not to. The number of Fedora downloads and active users contradict your statements.
No one distro is best... and distro choice has a lot to do with personal perference.
One of the contributing factors to Ubuntu's popularity is the "ShipIt Free CDs" option. I mean, who doesn't like that?
Fool you once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 1:32 UTC (Sat) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] > One of the contributing factors to Ubuntu's popularity is the "ShipIt Free CDs" option. I mean, who doesn't like that? I don't, because I'd much rather install from a USB flash drive.
Fool you once? Posted Nov 18, 2006 18:21 UTC (Sat) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] I don't like the shipit feature anymore since 6.06, when they changed over to the live cd install. I prefer the old-style installer for e.g. server or xubuntu installs, so I typically just download a server install cd and burn that. Once installed it's about a one-step process (apt-get install [xk]ubuntu-desktop) to get to the default desktop state, at least as far as I can tell.
We do tend to order a 10-pack at work of the stable versions which are passed around to interested people, but I can't say I've had much use for 6.06 cd's sofar.
Fool you once? Posted Nov 20, 2006 16:38 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] "One of the contributing factors to Ubuntu's popularity is the "ShipIt Free CDs" option. I mean, who doesn't like that?" Do anyone actually USE that? Ok, with a modem it makes sense, but why wait for at least a day (and probably much longer), when you can have it down on an ADSL connection in a few hours.
Try it before you use it Posted Nov 20, 2006 17:40 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] To hand it to friends and newcomers, of course. Some of them are bound to try it sometime and realize what they are missing. Others can be sure whether their hardware is supported. A well-packaged version inspires more trust than a CD burnt by an unknown entity.
Try it before you use it Posted Nov 20, 2006 20:36 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] Hmmm, good point, at events they would be great! :)
Following Sun's lead with Java, perhaps? Posted Nov 20, 2006 2:54 UTC (Mon) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, #9624) [Link] Is RedHat simply following Sun's dual-license lead here? (Hey, had to ask!)
Paul E. McKenney (My wild speculation, not necessarily that of my employer)
Following Sun's lead with Java, perhaps? Posted Nov 20, 2006 4:57 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Its completely unrelated. The dual licensing model was not introduced by Sun. Several other products like QT, MySQL etc having been using it for years. The subscription model is not dual licensing since both versions use the same license but varies in support, services, lifecycle etc and as the article itself notes, RHEL vs Fedora exists using that model already as does Opensolaris vs Solaris to some extend although there are licensing differences in between them too.
Dual licensing? Posted Nov 20, 2006 18:19 UTC (Mon) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] Perl is also dual licensed... and that has been around for HOW long?
Fedora success Posted Nov 20, 2006 13:22 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] All the buzz around Ubuntu may make it seem like Fedora isn't successful but the terabytes of data served from my Fedora mirrors in the days after the FC6 release tell me otherwise.
Red Hat ponders new JBoss strategy (ZDNet) Posted Nov 18, 2006 1:44 UTC (Sat) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link] Jboss seems to be a bit different to me. I use it because it works and it's stable. Fedora is a bit different, it's kind of a classic linux problem, you want a stable distribution but you also want new software now sometimes. It's hard to provide stable at the same time as bleeding edge.To compound fedora's problems, it's still the same redhat, they changed some graphics and have done a few evolutionary things but nothing terribly revolutionary. It's good enough for a desktop, it's not a server grade system though. You will have to reboot it and I've seen flakiness, I've yumed a kernel that seemed to panic my system pretty regularly. As I get older, I find myself much more willing to be a bit slower to adopt things if I have to screw with them less. Me thinks Redhat might have been better served by adding a really good revert system to RPM and just letting people screw around with rawhide and revert stuff than spinning off fedora. When I build an app on JBoss, it's a different matter. If there is any jboss flakiness, I'll just go to glassfish or geronimo. That technology moves at a much slower pace, fundamentally too.
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