LWN: Comments on "The end of the Fedora Foundation"

The end of the Fedora Foundation

rahulsundaram — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:37:37 +0000

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

pls ignore grammatical mistakes

bkoz — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:02:09 +0000

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

wtogami — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 03:22:37 +0000

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.

Bandwidth Costs

smoogen — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 23:54:33 +0000

It is sold at a loss if the total bandwidth was used for the entire month. It is the fact that most people do not that makes it profitable. Areas where more people max out the bandwidth there are losses. At the 200 kbit/s range the local ISPs I have consulted with see a loss with P2P and online movies. [The ISPs arent going to see 1mbit/s or 8mbit/s for a while since we are in the rural badlands of Qwest.]

The end of the Fedora Foundation

error27 — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:51:09 +0000

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

eric_boutilier — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 19:27:10 +0000

Joe Buck wrote:

... 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...

Maybe Red Hat should take a page from the OpenSolaris Charter. I.e., see:
- Red Hat revises Fedora governance

What happened to the Ubuntu Foundation?

cjwatson — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:16:12 +0000

The communication since the original announcement hasn't been perfect, but the purpose of the Ubuntu Foundation is more like a trust than the active purpose that the Fedora Foundation had. That is, in case Canonical's commercial activities don't turn out to be sustainable, then the Foundation and its endowment are there to guarantee that Ubuntu can at least meet its stated commitments, such as five-year support of Ubuntu 6.06 on servers, and continue to produce new releases; it would also provide a legal framework for the project and its community. Unless and until that happens (and, at present, we hope it remains an unlikely prospect), there isn't much point eating into rainy-day funds, so primary funding of Ubuntu development will still be from Canonical, and the Foundation will remain as a trust fund.

Either way, project governance remains with the Ubuntu Community Council and Technical Board, each of which at present have one non-Canonical-employed member, but that isn't fixed.

Colin Watson
Ubuntu developer and Community Council member

Bandwidth Costs

pjones — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 15:11:00 +0000

Fedora is released on bittorrent at the same time it's released on ftp. Details are at http://torrent.fedoraproject.net/ . One minor difference between the torrent and ftp is that many people involved in the release seed the torrent ahead of time, so there is a reasonable cloud when we announce it.

Since the release on the 20th, the the various FC5 torrents have had roughly 55000 downloads, totalling nearly 165 terrabytes of data transferred.

Believe me, we know about bittorrent.

What happened to the Ubuntu Foundation?

lacostej — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:40:35 +0000

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/UbuntuFoundation ?

Different Reason

nix — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:35:46 +0000

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.

Different Reason

bkoz — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 09:48:38 +0000

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).

The end of the Fedora ... film at 11

philips — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 07:51:06 +0000

I did not want to sound like "End of Fedora".

I was talking about people who still remember what RHL was and what Fedora was. (Like I do)

Every *new* user Fedora project gets has no knowledge what RHL was and what Fedora was. All they know is FC aka "Fedora Core".

Try to read the letter from the POV of new user: it make no sence.
Try to read the letter from the POV of ol' timer: it sounds like late excuse.

Different Reason

dberkholz — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 07:48:27 +0000

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

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

loening — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 05:42:58 +0000

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.

What happened to the Ubuntu Foundation?

wtogami — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 05:21:20 +0000

Out of curiosity I tried searching around for any more recent infromation about the Ubuntu Foundation. It seems that the two links to Canonical and Ubuntu's wikis where there previously was information are now gone:
http://www.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFoundation
http://www.canonical.com/UbuntuFoundation

All other hits are news articles repeating the initial press release of the Ubuntu Foundation, but no central page with updated information about what has been going on with the Ubuntu Foundation. Anybody have any idea what happened to the Ubuntu Foundation?

I wonder if they ran into similar difficulties as us in realizing the pros and cons of a non-profit organization. Just curious ...

Warren Togami
wtogami@redhat.com

Different Reason

wtogami — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:12:43 +0000

I am Warren Togami, founder of the Fedora Project. I am currently hired by Red Hat to work on both building and enabling the community. For example, my current project is to explore how we can redo our infrastructure so the community can development directly on Fedora Core.

I have a different emphasis of the key reason for the Foundation cancellation.

The key reason for me personally was Max's point THREE, the part about the IRS requirements for funding a non-profit corporation. The community simply cannot donate at a fast enough pace to fund the huge and still growing organization that Fedora has become. By IRS rules, the community must fund through many small donations a minimum of 33% of funds. Funding the bandwidth alone of Fedora downloads, it would be too heavy a strain on public donations. And bandwidth is only a tiny fraction of the expenses that Red Hat pays to further the cause of Fedora.

Just some of the things that Red Hat spends a ton of money to create or enhance:
- gcc
- glibc
- SELinux
- udev
- Xen
- GNOME
- Many other parts of the kernel
- X.org
- Fedora Directory Server (bought for millions, open sourced, development continues)
- NetworkManager
- Dogtail
- Open Source Java (gcj and Classpath)
- Internationalization (Input Methods, Translation, Localization, etc.)

Red Hat spends literally millions per year on Fedora development and infrastructure, I don't have any idea how much exactly. It takes many years to build a non-profit organization that is capable of generating multi-million dollar income from community donations. For this reason it was simply infeasible to run Fedora as a non-profit Foundation, as doing so would severely hinder the amount of input we could put into all aspects of the project.

Fortunately, Red Hat *is* interested in funding this growth because of the clear reasons of mutual benefit between the company and community. The community gets a great deal of progress out of Red Hat engineering for many aspects of Linux distributions and related software. Both upstream projects and the greater FOSS ecosystem benefits from this. Fedora itself benefits from other FOSS ecosystem participants. Then Red Hat occasionally uses pieces of Fedora to productize and support for customers, generating revenue, which completes the cycle enabling investment into FOSS development.

We didn't understand this as goal back when we were initially building Fedora, but it is now clear from what Fedora has become. The Primary Goal of Fedora is "Rapid Progress of Free & Open Source Software".

In the ensuing months, Red Hat will prove its genuine intentions to grow a community based the values of FOSS, with a leadership model of meritocracy. The Fedora Project will show through actions that it not only defends the values of Free and Open Source Software, but emphasizes the need for Rapid Progress of the features and functionality necessary for FOSS to better compete against proprietary software.

Today Fedora has contributors totalling ~300 in the projects spanning Extras, Ambassadors, Documentation, Sysadmins and Legacy. If you count the number of translator accounts, that number is actually above 3,000. Fedora Updates pushes 10-20 packages a week, while nearly a dozen packages are added to Extras on a weekly basis. This is substantial growth compared to a year ago, and this growth continues.

I think Red Hat hasn't been trying hard enough to tell the community about this progress, partly because it wasn't going well at first. But now clear changes are happening across the board, and this is only the beginning. I realize the community has plenty to be skeptical about Fedora, but that is OK, because we will simply do it and prove it.

Warren Togami
wtogami@redhat.com

The end of the Fedora Foundation

finster — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:10:11 +0000

Personally, I last fedora install I did was FC2 which is still humming along fine on a few machines. Would have used FC3 but did not have a reason to. Then I saw that dagwieers did not have rpms for FC4. There appears to be or has been an issue between various repositories. By then I was not happy with yum and its difficulties in bringing down the header files in a reasonable time, so apt was a must. I'm sure apt installs can still be done, but I decided to completely migrate over to debian which I was running at the time on various boxes anyway. Also use kanotix on laptops. But I used RH from 5.0 up to 9, then FC1 and FC2.

I hope RH and FC will continue to grow.

Bandwidth Costs

butlerm — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 01:49:56 +0000

Internet bandwidth (properly measured) is not sold at a loss to home users. A typical home user with a 1 Mbit/sec connection consumes only a small fraction of that on average, even during peak hours. A typical ISP makes a pretty healthy margin on bandwidth when measured in terms of net cost per GB transferred, a margin that increases with economies of scale.

Bandwidth Costs

beoba — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:39:57 +0000

Bittorrent.

The end of the Fedora ... film at 11

smoogen — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:36:47 +0000

pizza: I think I was subtly agreeing with you. I took what you stated as givens (LUGs being populated by the most 'devoted' Linux users)

The end of the Fedora Foundation

hppnq — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:20:27 +0000

Seconded.

Just state, proudly, in the future that Fedora is a Red Hat project.

I think they just did. ;-)

The end of the Fedora ... film at 11

pizza — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:08:30 +0000

This anectdote displays one flaw, one best demonstrated by just about every hardware and gaming website. If you believe what you read there, you'd think that everyone has a pair of $500 graphics cards in a PC with a $1000 overclocked, watercooled processor in a case filled with midgets at a rave.

Which is clearly ludicrous.

LUGs tend to represent the fanatical extremes just as those review sites do.

So I'll say this: Don't discount the mainstream. That's where the *vast* majority of users are. Where you used to have to go to a LUG to get Linux installed successfully, now it rarely takes more than a couple of mouse clicks. You don't need to be a fanatic now, as it by and large JustWorks(tm).

And that's all most people care about.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

pizza — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:55:11 +0000

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 ... film at 11

smoogen — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:51:52 +0000

I keep hearing about how people are moving away from Fedora left and right, but the Fedora downloads have been growing from the mirrors I look after. I am not saying Ubuntu etc arent growing also, but I havent seen this big drop-off of downloads.

What I do see is that people going to the LUGS arent running it anymore.. but I dont see a lot of the people who are downloading/using it at LUG meetings either. The LUGs seem to be the same people with a couple of new faces every now and then but not a large growth in their numbers.

Note: While I worked at Red Hat, I do not have a staked interest if no-one else in the world used Fedora than me.

Bandwidth Costs

smoogen — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:43:59 +0000

I worked at Red Hat for several years and so my comments can be dismissed as more propaganda.. but I can say that the bandwidth costs are accurate. When I was running the FTP mirrors in 2000->2001, the costs were over 500,000 a year for our mirror sites. The amount of bandwidth has gone up and the costs are no longer being 'given' away prices.

Bandwidth was the largest cost of the mirror servers. The 6 servers and their Netapp backend was a pittance in how much it cost for bandwidth.. and we were given deep discounts during the dotcom hype to get Red Hat's name on XYZ's colo name. Bandwidth is the hidden cost of the Internet commons.

The reason I am commenting on this, is that I have had multiple conversations where people do the math that if they put together 100 home DSL's they would supposedly have the same bandwidth as some colo and not pay as much as the business says it puts into costs. Most people dont realize that most home users get loss-leader pricing that is supplemented by higher costs to businesses... Universities also get a discount but that has been going away in some spots. [At least a couple US midwest university IT people have told me that they are looking at charging bandwidth costs per dorm room to cover the rising costs they are getting.]

The end of the Fedora Foundation

charris — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:28:27 +0000

Guess I'm one of those unique individuals who made the switch to Fedora. And Fedora keeps getting better and better with the expanding extras repository.

Question authority!
Be different!
Use Fedora!

Chuck

not a huge deal

b7j0c — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:56:32 +0000

red hat has maintained a de facto leadership presence in any case, they might as well formalize it, and to be certain, there are things a truly independent community might like to do with fedora that would clash with red hat's goals (like for example, consider rpm alternatives etc). its still a decent deal for users - red hat has a huge vested interest in making sure the product is high quality.

that said, i don't think this will change the course of the distro market. ubuntu has incredible momentum, and has itself become an LSB++ for distro vendors.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

error27 — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:46:59 +0000

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

JoeBuck — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:27:08 +0000

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.

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

azhrei_fje — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:15:53 +0000

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.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

lolando — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:05:46 +0000

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.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

gowen — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:03:48 +0000

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

mattdm — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:40:26 +0000

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?

The end of the Fedora Foundation

thomask — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:39:47 +0000

I agree. Anyone who really thought Fedora was going to become a decent community-orientated project along the lines of Ubuntu/Debian/Gentoo etc. was suffering from some delusions.

The end of the Fedora Foundation

philips — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:08:19 +0000

Most people who cared and used RHL for many years already went off of the RH/Fedora few years ago. Some went SUSE, some went Mandrake, some went Debian.

IOW, I hardly understand the target audience of the letter. As if somebody had illusions where control of Fedora have been all this years...