Different Reason [LWN.net]

Different Reason

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:48 UTC (Thu) by dberkholz (guest, #23346)
In reply to: Different Reason by wtogami
Parent article: The end of the Fedora Foundation

A (c)6 isn't subject to that restriction, however...

to post comments

Different Reason

Posted Apr 6, 2006 9:48 UTC (Thu) by bkoz (guest, #4027) [Link] (2 responses)

I was surprised to re-read the Fedora announcement and see point five prioritized as well. In defense of LWN, it was prioritized in the announcement itself ("the real heart of the matter", etc.).

To me, it was the funding issue, period. It was illuminating to see just the bandwidth costs spelled out. Apparently this is a way to see some of the bandwidth usage (but not all):

http://torrent.linux.duke.edu:6969/

This brings up the real issue, to me at least. Do hackers really want to mess with funding? Does this mean that Fedora/Red Hat hackers dress up in black ties and attend swanky events in big shiny buildings to support "donations" in the form of inflated ticket prices? That we start making brownies and selling them outside of LUG meetings? That we start hob-nobbing with big telcos and try to get them to donate funding? That before every Fedora release there is a pledge-a-thon for bandwidth?
Do we want to start tracking how many hours spent per week dealing with FC builds (as opposed to RHEL builds)? Do we want to have to expense attending LSB meetings and tracking lsb-futures as a Fedora expense? Etc. etc.

I have full confidence that the Red Hat financial people scoped out all the angles. These dudes know there stuff, in my experience...

This isn't to say that the tension between Red Hat, the patron of Fedora, and rest of the community doesn't exist. It does. However, the governance issue is a problem that can be solved, or one that can be made better, at the very least. (And one that hopefully the new Fedora Board will make a first priority.)

I don't really see the funding-related issues as solvable, in a sustained way.

It is interesting to note that other "community" distros are also funded by a generous benefactor, and do not rely on the financial support of the community. The community distros that don't have a patron, not surprisingly, have financial issues (ie OpenBSD).

Different Reason

Posted Apr 6, 2006 11:35 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Furthermore, it's not as though someone who's convinced that RH has gone Evil can't fork Fedora; that fundamental freedom remains, and always will (although I hope it never needs to be exercised).

In practice though RH isn't going to go Evil because if it did it'd lose all its developers; it's not as though nobody else is looking to hire, say, a libstdc++ developer, to pick an example not at random. Even if RH were run by short-termist ultracorporate idiots (which it isn't), it would still have the horrible cautionary example of what happened to Caldera, which haemorrhaged its developers in torrents once it turned Evil.

So I think we're safe regardless.

pls ignore grammatical mistakes

Posted Apr 7, 2006 10:02 UTC (Fri) by bkoz (guest, #4027) [Link]

Oh, how I wish I had spell checked this, or posted not jet-lagged.

Is there anyway to edit LWN postings after the fact?

Damn the effectiveness of google searches!

Different Reason

Posted Apr 7, 2006 3:22 UTC (Fri) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]

As Max stated, 501(c)6 was too infeasible because of things like:

- This doesn't really gain us anything that Red Hat the company cannot do.
- It would incur significantly more costs in accounting and legal.
- People cannot contribute money and have a tax deduction.

If I understand the situation correctly, 501(c)6 is usually benefitial as a consortium between companies. Fedora Project is not a community of companies, but a community of people, so this makes it very unattractive given the other costs and lack of benefits.