New Fedora leadership draft posted [LWN.net]

For those who are interested, Red Hat has posted a new draft leadership scheme for the Fedora Project. Changes are listed at the end. "The idea of voting bodies was removed. It was creating too much complexity in infrastructure to retain the amount of control that Red Hat requires for its participation in the project, for no real gain. It was also contrary to existing practice, both in Linux and Red Hat's experience building a distribution."

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New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 3, 2003 2:59 UTC (Wed) by macemoneta (guest, #2717) [Link] (3 responses)

Sounds like it's back to being Redhat Linux, in everything except name. That should make a lot of people happy, but it makes the whole exercize seem kind of futile.

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 3, 2003 15:39 UTC (Wed) by Shewmaker (guest, #1126) [Link] (2 responses)

It sounds to me like Fedora will be open to non-RedHat, merit-based leadership. The people who wrote this are aiming for a process more like the Linux kernel than Debian. That is probably a good choice since it is important that they have low barriers to entry for contributors so that they can grow the Fedora community quickly.

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 4, 2003 2:39 UTC (Thu) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223) [Link] (1 responses)

The big question is how the current and potential contributors take this. RedHat seems to have demanded that they keep control of the "big stick"; at the end of the day they get to override anyone else. Will that turn people off regardless of how they wield it, or will people give them a chance and see if it (the stick) gets left in the cupboard.

If people get turned off (and Bruce Perens has a good summary of the "why" in his User Linux manifesto) then it doesn' matter what RedHat intends; Fedora will be dead as a "community" project and it really is RedHat 10 without any support.

Fedora is Red Hat 10

Posted Dec 4, 2003 5:54 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Of course Fedora Core is Red Hat 10. Basically the same people are building and maintaining it, and it's supported in the sense that they are fixing bugs as they are found, and have email forums where people can ask for help. In that sense, the level of support has been reduced, but it hasn't gone away. Red Hat won't tell you this, because they want you to pay for Enterprise.

Changing the support model freed them up to support apt and yum; previously they competed with a profit center (Red Hat Network). But Red Hat can't afford to let the quality suffer, because it's the proving ground for their future Enterprise versions and the people involved have their personal reputations at stake.

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 3, 2003 9:45 UTC (Wed) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] (1 responses)

What just again reminded me that RedHat *ages* behind Debian.

1. System to maintain project of this size (hundreds of people, thousands of packages) IIRC Debian already went thru couple management collapses - RHF is just facing this. No way you can setup big organization perfectly at first take.

2. Distributed coworking schemes and practices - Debian mantainers have here more than five years of experience - a few of them decade. RadHat is just starting. This is not that easy as it may seem. And RedHat always had "Made by NOT RedHat people" problem, that's IMHO why they have failed - and now do restart anew with Fedora. They need to learn to be more flexible and tolerable.

But in any way. I hope this will give Debian a good competitor in long-run. Competition is very good. Especially for end-users like i am ;-)))

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 3, 2003 15:30 UTC (Wed) by philips (guest, #937) [Link]

holy shit. I have read some one else mind.
check http://userlinux.com/white_paper.html

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 3, 2003 13:07 UTC (Wed) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

Really elegant move, from a business point of view. Red Hat has miraculously managed to both eliminate a competing open project and to cut costs on development and support of its own offering, all in a really simple three-move combo: 1) announce corporate support for A, 2) cut spendings on B as no longer necessary, 3) force A to become B using the leverage aquired on stage 1. Who said "hostile takeover"?

New Fedora leadership draft posted

Posted Dec 4, 2003 15:50 UTC (Thu) by krprescott (guest, #14884) [Link]

Well.... Seems like redhat wants to have its cake and eat it to...
On one hand, they want a free project, but then they want to maintain control over it on the other...
"If it walks like a duck...."
If people think back, this is nothing new for RedHat...
After they acquired HKS inc. they sold us CCVS, and then took all of us who had purchased it and then sent us a email one day saying that it would no longer be supported.
At the ISP I used to work for, I preached Redhat all the time...
I even purchased rhn subscriptions to support them...
Now, they have done it again.
All the rhn subscriptions I purchased are now worthless...
The main reason I installed Redhat in the first place was to have easy
package management and easy updating...
Even if the fedora project goes on to release more good stable releases, how can we trust anything Redhat???
for them to say that it is a community project, and then have all the people in charge be RedHat people, and to furthermore state RedHat can change anything they want?
I wouldn't develope under that model.

Fedora versus Debian

Posted Dec 4, 2003 19:17 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]

It seems to me that people like Debian over Fedora because of the community support. I believe that Fedora will give users the same benefit in the long run simply because they are including tools like apt-get and yum in the distribution. This allows people to setup and maintain third-party repositories more easily.

When I hear people suggesting that Debian should become the base for the desktop, I'm surprised, because I think Fedora is far closer to delivering what users (not developers) want than Debian. But Debian does have the advantage of a large distributed support community.

I like RedHat/Fedora over Debain because of the following factors.

Ubiquity (for me). My friends and coworkers use RedHat, so we can share our knowledge more easily and get things working more efficiently.
Commericial support. Companies are more likely to support their software on RedHat than on Debian, so knowing RedHat makes my Linux knowledge more marketable and useful. (I'm a programmer)
Polish. RedHat has great polish for install, look-and-feel, etc.
Hardware auto-detection with Kudzu. This makes my life far easier than in Debian.
Init scripts. I really like RedHat's init script system. When you start and stop services, it feels polished. The scripts are well written. Debian's init scripts and init system lack this polish (but they do work).
Configuration utilities. I like having the main config utilites to have a standard naming scheme, that way I can use tab-completion in bash to find out what tools there are. They all start with "redhat-config-". I don't really care what they start with -- as long as they are consistent.
apt-get and yum package management tools. These are shipped with Fedora, and are available as add-on packages for RedHat (see http://freshrpms.net). Now we need Synaptic to be installed by default. It blows the socks off of up2date.
Reasonably up-to-date software is shipped on CD at least once per year. For people without fat internet pipes, this is a huge deal. They can keep semi-up-to date with CDs. Try that with Debian (I guess you have to use a debian derivative like Knoppix, which I very much like).

I like debian over RedHat/Fedora because:

I can get bleeding-edge software somewhat easily because there is a huge and distributed developer base submitting packages. Try that with RedHat -- it's a nightmare. I hope Fedora will give me that via several third-party apt repositories (like freshrpms)
Knoppix. This is the best bootable live CD I've used. And I can install it to hard drive.

Maybe it shows, but I've used RedHat for longer than I've used Debian. I've only recently tried Debian, and while I'm fairly pleased with it, I still prefer RedHat due to many of the items I listed above. Maybe I'll become a complete debian convert in time.