An Evening with Bruce Perens [LWN.net]

An Evening with Bruce Perens

Posted Oct 9, 2003 11:06 UTC (Thu) by deatrich (subscriber, #25)
Parent article: An Evening with Bruce Perens

Bruce said:
> I'm wondering if it's time for a grass-roots enterprise Linux, and the way
> I figured I would do this... is first of all take Debian, why is there a
> Fedora project when there's Debian, a ten-year-old project with all its
> policies done...with over a thousand developers?

Because, in part, it is the open-source way :o) People work on what please
them. I'm a bit surprised that Bruce asked this.

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An Evening with Bruce Perens

Posted Oct 9, 2003 17:58 UTC (Thu) by zone (guest, #3633) [Link]

>> why is there a Fedora project when there's Debian

This is obvious the question that occured to me when I read the Fedora annoucement. As far as I can tell, Fedora and Debian fill identical roles. Take Fedora's objectives statement, remove the RedHat-isms and a few minor points, and you've got Debian's Social Contract.

If Fedora is going to fill any gaps Debian may not have filled yet, they'll need to re-package the vast majority of 10,000 packages, establish a Constitution in order to mediate disputes, and create a Policy Manual to set the technical tone and policies for the project. I have no doubt it can be done, and that Fedora can co-exist with Debian. The question is, why bother?

> Because, in part, it is the open-source way :o)

Competition is part of the Open Source way, sure, but reducing duplicated effort is a very big part as well. As well, competition at the application level is vastly more important than competition at the distribution level. After all, if you spend much time administering the distribution itself, it's probably not fulfilling its mission: to facilitate the use of the kernel and applications, which are what you're really interested in.

An Evening with Bruce Perens

Posted Oct 9, 2003 19:13 UTC (Thu) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link]

> As far as I can tell, Fedora and Debian fill identical roles.

However, Fedora is a compatible extension of Red Hat 9. Debian is not. This point is critical to both Red Hat (who wants to use Fedora as the base for their Enterprise products), their customers (who want stability and compatibility), and anyone else who wants Red Hat Linux.

Using Debian is not an option.

On the other hand, perhaps Fedora and Debian could/should merge at some point in the future, if they have develop similar comunities and philosophies, but that requires compromise on a number of technical issues. I think that is possible, and perhaps desirable, but there is a lot work needed first.

An Evening with Bruce Perens

Posted Oct 9, 2003 22:08 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Fedora also has newer packages than Debian unstable does, though not as many. Gnome 2.4, Xfree86 4.3, kernels with a number of interesting 2.6 features backported, etc.