The end of the Fedora Foundation

The end of the Fedora Foundation

Posted Apr 5, 2006 16:27 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: The end of the Fedora Foundation

I've had some debates with several people who work on Fedora (both inside and outside Red Hat), and all of them were assuming that the Foundation represented "point five" in the article above, that it represented Red Hat giving up control of Fedora, at least partially. I pointed out that Red Hat could not do that, that Red Hat needs Fedora to be what it is, which is a proving ground for software and technology that will go into future RHEL releases.

My only objection to the handling of Fedora has been the communication about it. For some reason, the Fedora folks have trouble just saying, straight out, what Fedora is and always has been: a Red Hat-controlled project to produce a high-quality, cutting-edge free (both libre and gratis) distribution. They don't want to beat drums about the high quality because of fear of damage to RHEL sales; they don't want to talk about Red Hat control because they are afraid that the rest of the free software community will object.

But there is nothing to be ashamed of. People who do this work full-time are in a better position to make good decisions than those of us who have to divide our attention more. The cutting-edge nature of Fedora makes it a suboptimal choice for deployments that need more stability. Just state, proudly, in the future that Fedora is a Red Hat project.

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