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The new Fedora Project
Last July, Red Hat let it be known the Red Hat Linux, as a retail product,
was coming to an end. Red Hat's customers would be steered, instead, at
the company's "enterprise" products, which are aimed at corporate needs
and, incidentally, bring in a lot more revenue to the company. The
company's strategy has had some success; Red Hat's recently announced
quarterly results show an increase to about 26,000 Enterprise Linux
subscriptions. Those subscriptions brought in almost $15 million in
revenue over the quarter (enterprise services brought in another
$9 million).
What replaced Red Hat Linux at that time was the "Red Hat Linux Project," an attempt to transform the process of making Red Hat's core distribution into a more open, community-oriented project. Now, this distribution has gone through another change, as announced on September 22:
Red Hat and Fedora Linux are pleased to announce an alignment of
their mutually complementary core proficiencies leveraging them
synergistically in the creation of the Fedora Project, a paradigm
shift for Linux technology development and rolling early deployment
models.
The rest of the announcement, thankfully, is in English. The old Fedora Linux Project was an independent effort to create a set of high-quality add-on packages for Red Hat Linux. Fedora had managed to put together a set of policies, a development community, and an initial set of packages. Red Hat, in its effort to kick-start the Red Hat Linux Project, saw value in all of those things. So now the two projects have merged into a single entity called the Fedora project. The project stuck with the Fedora name, among other reasons, so that the resulting distribution would not run into trademark problems with the Red Hat name. (There may yet be confusion with the Fedora Project hosted at Cornell, which is developing a free digital repository management system.) Red Hat is still putting together policies and documentation for the new project, so some of the details are still coming into focus. The project leadership role will be in the capable hands of Michael K. Johnson, one of the Red Hat originals. There will be a a steering committee appointed by Red Hat; it currently consists of Karen Bennet, Cristian Gafton, Michael K. Johnson, Jeff Law, and Stephen Tweedie. The plan also calls for an advisory committee, the makeup and duties of which has not yet been determined. Finally, there will be a "technical committee," which is simply the union of the steering and advisory committees. The Fedora project's output will consist of three distinct sets of packages:
The project planners also foresee a "Fedora Legacy" area for the maintenance of older packages, and a "third party" area that will become the Fedora equivalent of Debian's non-free. Red Hat will have nothing to do with the non-free code, however. According to the posted schedule, the "test 2" release of the Fedora core is due on September 25. There is a third test release planned for October 13, and the final release should be out on November 3. Then work begins on "Fedora Core 2", which will be, with luck, based on the 2.6 kernel. To succeed, Fedora must attract a significant amount of community interest and input. Red Hat needs external developers to help with the maintenance of the distribution and bring in new packages. It also very much needs an active user community which will test and deploy the Fedora distribution; to a great extent, Fedora will be part of the quality control process that packages go through before becoming part of the enterprise products. Bringing in developers will require making them feel like something other than unpaid Red Hat employees. That means giving Fedora a life outside of the company. Red Hat seems to understand that need; for example, Red Hat's Havoc Pennington says:
Red Hat will be doing a lot of development and other work on the
Fedora Project, but it's not a product that you can buy from
us. We're working on the Fedora Project in the same way that we
work on other projects such as Mozilla or the Linux kernel.
Of course, this claim is not entirely true: Red Hat does not name, by fiat, the members of any "steering committees" for Mozilla or the kernel. But the idea the company is trying to get across is clear: Fedora, as a project, is separate from Red Hat and its products. The degree to which that is true, and to which Red Hat can step back and let Fedora find its own path will be crucial to Fedora's success. Letting go could be hard for Red Hat to do; almost anybody who has done business with that company will attest that Red Hat, while well-intentioned, very much likes to retain control over the projects it works on. Red Hat also has a history of working well with the free software community, however; they understand well how the free development process works. So when the company says something like:
Anyway, it's not just about what Red Hat developers work on
anymore. Anybody can drive the project in a different direction by
developing the code and making a case for including it.
There is a good chance that things will work out that way. (Log in to post comments)
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 24, 2003 21:04 UTC (Wed) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] Letting go could be hard for Red Hat to do; almost anybody who has done business with that company will attest that Red Hat, while well-intentioned, very much likes to retain control over the projects it works on.I'm not convinced that Red Hat "letting go" is a good idea. If you want to see what it's likely to turn into if Red Hat "lets go", just look at the Debian distribution. The Debian people have done some great things, and I approve of their philosophy, but their distribution is all but impossible for anyone who is not a Linux expert to install or maintain. A friend and I, both of whom are moderately expert with Linux, recently tried doing an install and were completely amazed and dumbfounded at the ridiculous questions the installer asks. And when I brought this up with a long-time Debian user, he said that this was the new, simpler installer! If Red Hat maintains some degree of control over the project, I think that will help keep the focus on providing a good user experience, rather than having 42 bazillion install options.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 24, 2003 21:26 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] RPM packages don't ask questions. The RealPlayer package is a single evil exception, but it's not free software anyways.Fedora doesn't replace Red Hat installer. Debian did not become harder to install and maintain than it had ever been. It's just they didn't pay enough attention to improving their tools, whereas users' expectations have changed.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 24, 2003 22:14 UTC (Wed) by Strike (guest, #861) [Link] The Debian people have done some great things, and I approve of their philosophy, but their distribution is all but impossible for anyone who is not a Linux expert to install or maintain. Install? Yes. Maintain? No. Debian is super-easy to maintain. Easier than anything else I've ever used (including all the RedHat's since back in the 6.x days), that's for certain. Though getting it there is indeed a bit of a chore. However, the issue has been recognized and is being worked on. Debian is a bit behind the game in terms of user-friendliness, but that's okay as they don't have a profit margin to fill and they are focusing on getting the core to be a lot better instead (which is why it's so easy to maintain). I do have to hand it to the people who have coded up RedHat's installer though ... top notch stuff.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 19:01 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Install? Yes. Maintain? No. Debian is super-easy to maintain.I agree, 99 percent. The dissenting 1 percent comes into play when I run into a broken package and have to start messing around with post-install scripts in /var/lib/dpkg/info to try and figure out what's broken. It could be argued that most users should be using the stable release, but stable is so out of date that most desktop users would rather use Red Hat or SuSE and go through RPM hell. My solution is to use unstable for my workstation, but I keep a stable partition around just in case unstable blows up.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 3:06 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] You ran into debconf, which lets you choose configuration options and have them preserved across upgrades regardless of file format changes. Next time, just set your threshold priority to "critical" and the defaults will be used for 95% of the questions (or thereabouts, I haven't actually measured but it's about this). Then just run "dpkg-reconfigure --priority=low <packagename>" to adjust any individual package.The RPM alternative is to live in config file hell, where you use emacs/vi and manpages to configure each package by hand, only to have every single one of your configs borked on the next upgrade! Manually updating several dozen config files to new formats is a real PITA... Given the choice, I'll take Debian any time!
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:31 UTC (Thu) by heinlein (guest, #1029) [Link]
That's less true with each Red Hat release. The /etc/sysconfig directory is becoming home to localizations that can be kept through an update or maintained with a tool like cfengine. Plus, rpm package maintainers are paying more attention to marking configuration files as such so that new packages don't stomp on customized config files.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 4:41 UTC (Thu) by kbob (guest, #1770) [Link] The Debian people have done some great things, and I approve of their philosophy, but their distribution is all but impossible for anyone who is not a Linux expert to install or maintain.Apparently you didn't get the word. The Debian installer is called KNOPPIX. Yeah, I know. It's not obvious. But KNOPPIX makes installing Debian as trivial as keeping Debian up to date, if (and only if) you want a desktop install.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 14:09 UTC (Thu) by haraldt (guest, #961) [Link] It has to be noted: The new debian-installer is still not finished. It's been made useable for x86-based computers plus, perhaps, some other platforms but it's not all the way there. Not by far. The thing about debian-installer is, it's a better base for making simple install routines. The user shells may not be all that simple yet, but that's what comes when the base is in shape.
Debian *is* easy to install Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:09 UTC (Thu) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link] Dude, get a clue!!I installed Debian GNU/Linux years ago and was pleased to see it's still much the same process today. It asks you lots (or little as mentioned in another reply) of well explained questions so you get what you want just about straight out of the box. And that's it. No really that's it. Ocasionnally I run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, if e.g. there's been a new stable release or a security release of a package. The installer is not difficult, it just asks you questions which are being asked because there is often no resonable default. I find installing Debian (old installer -- haven't tried this new fangled one) easier than Windows XP and 2000. FACT. So, much as the install process is a favourite drum of non-Debian GNU/Linux users to bang, I ask you does filling it with eye candy make an installer any better? Stu.
Debian *is* easy to install Posted Sep 25, 2003 20:47 UTC (Thu) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link] I find installing Debian (old installer -- haven't tried this new fangled one) easier than Windows XP and 2000. FACT.Er, no. Opinion. You find it easier, many users (obviously) do not. This is not a factual debate, it's one of opinion. I don't find the Debian installation routine to be that difficult, but I cut my Linux teeth on Slackware about seven years ago. However, almost any user who is installing Linux for the first time (assuming they're not crossing over from a proprietary UNIX or *BSD) is going to have problems with it. Conversely, I think many newbies could easily install Mandrake or SuSE so long as they're at least casually familiar with terms like DNS and so on. I also think "well explained" is a bit of a reach. That entirely depends on the point of view of the user. The uninitiated will have a bit of trouble parsing questions about whether SSH should have priviledge separation or not, and so on. And, IIRC, Debian doesn't assist the user in configuring their sound card or video card. It doesn't auto-detect the network card, leaving the user to guess which kernel module a particular NIC will need.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 15:12 UTC (Thu) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link] Red Hat doesn't seem to be 'letting go'. They are trying to get a user base as a beta test for their enterprise versions so it will not stray. In return, users are able to get cutting edge versions which are often impossible to obtain from Red Hat (especially major updates in Kde, Gnome and XFree86 - doing these yourself usually means problems down the line).
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 12:12 UTC (Thu) by pto (guest, #5753) [Link] I worry that it is in Red Hat's interests to keep Fedora Linux unstable. With "2 to 3" releases a year, no single Fedora release is likely to gain the kind of wide support and usage that Red Hat 7.x had, which made it a kind of defacto standard and indeed spawned Red Hat Enterprise.I think we need a free, stable Linux, as well as more experimental distributions. I follow projets like Blackdown and Ximian Desktop, and I think they will have trouble keeping up with a new Fedora every 4 months. So I may need to move to SuSE or Debian. And, I'll note that if I don't use Red Hat for my day-to-day personal use, I'm less likely to recommend Red Hat Enterprise for my corporate use.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 14:23 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (guest, #18) [Link] Seems like a vald concern. But "2 to 3" isn't much different from "2", is it?
The new Fedora Project & Ximian Posted Sep 25, 2003 14:43 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link] I Hope that Ximian support Fedora. I worry that they won't. However they may actully find it easier to support since the development process will be more open, they might even be able to steer it a bit. I also wonder if they will be supporting the RedHat Enterprise Stuff. That's what I plan to use at work and push to clients but if there's no Ximian, then I won't push the WS stuff.Bluecurve is just so far behind Ximian that's it's almost unuseable in comparison.
The new Fedora Project & Ximian Posted Sep 25, 2003 18:26 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] I'm personally hoping Novell/Ximian make their own desktop distro. Ximian mentioned it would be a nice thing, they just couldn't do it before. Not that they *will* do it now, only it's slightly more possible now with Novell's market and money behind them.
The new Fedora Project Posted Sep 25, 2003 21:14 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link] So after a long, windy road, the Debian fork called Red Hat starts becoming more and more its daddy... it's just like teenagers, only its crisis was a case of NIH syndrome combined with a quick-and-dirty solution to the time it took for Debian to create dpkg.
Red Hat a Debian fork? Posted Sep 27, 2003 23:28 UTC (Sat) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] Why do you say that? They are completely separate projects, both perhaps more of a shotoff from Slackware.
Red Hat a Debian fork? Posted Jan 6, 2004 13:48 UTC (Tue) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link] > Red Hat a Debian fork? Yes, RPM was created because RH didn't want to wait for Debian's process in creating dpkg.
marketspeak Posted Sep 26, 2003 0:48 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Red Hat and Fedora Linux are pleased to announce an alignment of their mutually complementary core proficiencies leveraging them synergistically in the creation of the Fedora Project, a paradigm shift for Linux technology development and rolling early deployment models. The rest of the announcement, thankfully, is in English. Nice to see the project has a sense of humor. I presume this (the wording, not whatever it might say) is tongue in cheek.
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