The end of the Fedora Foundation [LWN.net]

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 15:40 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: The end of the Fedora Foundation by philips
Parent article: The end of the Fedora Foundation

Most people who cared and used RHL for many years already went off of the RH/Fedora few years ago.

Do you have any data to back up this claim?

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The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 16:03 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (4 responses)

Do you have any data to back up this claim?

Assuming RH aren't lying about the amount of bandwidth the Fedora Core 5 isos sucked up, I'd go as far to say the data we have contradicts, rather than supports that claim. Unless, of course, "No-one goes there anymore, its too crowded."

Besides, the Linux Kernel isn't a community project; it's ruled by a sometimes-benevolent dictator (and don't even get me started on the management structure of OpenBSD). It's equally difficult to get code into FSF projects like GCC and emacs. Why is it necessarily a bad thing if Linux distributions are managed in the same way?

PS : the idea that people would switch to Novell's SuSE Linux because its a community-run project is too silly for words.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 16:46 UTC (Wed) by error27 (guest, #8346) [Link] (3 responses)

Communitee driven means how much outsiders work on the project as opposed to employees. The kernel is a communitee driven project. Linus doesn't pay any of the kernel developers they all come from random parts of the communitee.

Communitee doesn't mean good or bad. There are some sucky communitee driven projects.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 18:55 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

That definition of 'community' is nonsensical; these days the vast majority of the work on Free or Open Source Software is done by people paid to work on that software; ie employees of some other entity. This is especially true of the Linux kernel.

You are confused in your defintion of "community", because that can be defined in many different ways. Do you perhaps mean a community of *users* or a community of *developers*? Using the former, I don't know of any distributions which can be called "community-driven", but using the latter, nearly everyone qualifies, including Fedora.

Free Software has always been about contribution; The best way to influence the process of your favorite project is to, well, contribute some work.

Note that crucial word: Contribution.

The majority of the developers contributing to Fedora are paid by RedHat and thus work towards RedHat's interests. Why shouldn't RedHat have the largest say in what Fedora does?

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:51 UTC (Thu) by error27 (guest, #8346) [Link] (1 responses)

The key to what I was saying was that it's not _Linus's_ employee's who work on the kernel. It's employee's from RedHat, IBM, Novell etc who work on the kernel.

This affects how work is done. Linus doesn't say, "Bob, you work on devfs. Steve you work on preemption." Everyone decides for themselves what to work on. Sometimes the community can decide that some areas need more focus.

Obviously, Debian is a community effort. So it can be done.

When Fedora first launched some people hoped more developers would join the Fedora community and maintain packages. For example, Abiword was completely broken in rh9 and it caused the Abiword developers a lot of support headaches. If they could just distribute their own RPMs through the Fedora project maybe they could have avoided that.

It didn't turn out that way.

These days if Abiword was broken the developers would hopefully notice it before it went gold and file a bugzilla entry. So it's an improvement from before at least...

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 7, 2006 16:37 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

These day the upstream Abiword developers maintain the packages themselves in Fedora Extras and they like it better now than ever.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 16:05 UTC (Wed) by lolando (guest, #7139) [Link]

I have no idea about the claim or its validity, but Netcraft did show a net increase in Debian usage over the last few years.

Informal poll re: moving from Fedora to ...??

Posted Apr 5, 2006 16:15 UTC (Wed) by azhrei_fje (guest, #26148) [Link] (1 responses)

How about an informal poll (probably not here, though!).

In my experience as an educator (I do contract Linux training), students
that want to learn Linux will choose SUSE for use at home (more eye
candy). Sometimes a student whose company is running RHEL will choose
Fedora to use at home, in order to have the same core. Sometimes not.

I would say the ratio is roughly 2:1 OpenSUSE vs. Fedora. I bring DVD-Rs
of both to training classes with me to give away, and I will often compare
usability issues between distros during breaks -- multimedia and
suspend/resume support being the most often discussed areas.

I switched away from RHL back around v7.3. I still have a couple of boxes
for experimenting with Mandriva, Linspire, m0n0wall, and others from
distrowatch.org.

Informal poll re: moving from Fedora to ...??

Posted Apr 6, 2006 5:42 UTC (Thu) by loening (guest, #174) [Link]

Well, I've been in graduate school for the last couple of years (Bioengineering), and I've never actually seen a student run anything besides Redhat or Fedora. The campus shell servers here, however, are currently running Ubuntu.