RHL Project Status? -- It appears stalled at the moment

[John Beimler]

I know people have asked before, but what is the status of community 
building?  The website disappeared, and is now a single page. There is a 
   lot of discussion on what should and should not be done, but no 
opportunity for anyone to do it.

A lot of developers, including myself, are not going to put in any time 
or effort until there is a clear indication that this is something 
serious. Right now it looks like a well intentioned failed attempt.

Red Hat is pulling back inside, the web site got pulled down and has not 
been replaced, and there is no clear plan on where any of this is going.

I was really excited when I saw got the announcement of the Red Hat 
Linux project, I really thought that Red Hat, Inc. had gotten on the 
Clue Train, but right now, it looks like they are going to be left behind.

Red Hat needs to move this project forward somehow, perhaps setting up a 
  contribution area, setting up CVS for people, or some other service to 
show that Red Hat is serious about this. I'm sure there are a number of 
people that would really like to work with Red Hat to make their 
distribution the best, only if Red Hat would let us.

Peace.

john

[Stephen Smoogen]

This is getting asked daily. 

They are working on it. It takes time to deal with concerns from outside
parties and the fact that there are a lot of conferences in the last
month where people were at.

Not the answer you want? So sorry.

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 16:55, John Beimler wrote:
>  I know people have asked before, but what is the status of community
>
>  building?  The website disappeared, and is now a single page. There is a 
>     lot of discussion on what should and should not be done, but no 
>  opportunity for anyone to do it. 
-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen(a)lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Labrador  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645 (note new #)
Ta-03 SM-1498 MailStop B255 DP 10S  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --

[John Beimler]

Stephen Smoogen wrote:
>  This is getting asked daily. 
>   
Must be on a different list, sorry, I don't subscribe to all of Red
Hat's lists.

>  They are working on it. It takes time to deal with concerns from
> outside
>  parties and the fact that there are a lot of conferences in the last
>  month where people were at.
>  
>  Not the answer you want? So sorry.
>   
I appreciate your polite response. Thanks for being such a good 
represenative for the Red Hat Linux community.

If they weren't ready to do something about it, they shouldn't have 
announced it. The conferences didn't happen on a random dates, they are 
planned in advance. Red Hat should be used to working with outside 
parties by now, as you know, they've been in business for ten years now 
and have worked with a lot of heavy hitters.

People are looking for visible signs they are working on it. Customers
are looking, and all they see is a web site that got pulled down, and a
lot of whiners telling red hat how to run their business.

I'm not discussing this as a technical issue, but as a marketing issue.
It looks bad. People were all ready to jump in and help, and now thats
wearing off as nothing happens.

 From where I am it looks like a lot of vaopr. I want to see this work, 
and I know the developers at red hat do too, but all the waiting and 
thrashing is only chasing more and more people and corporate 
participants away.


Peace.

john

[Howard Owen]

Read Havoc Pennington's answer. It's reasonable, and I believe he's
telling the truth. If he is, what's the beef?

Obviously there was some confusion at Red Hat in that there was an 
announcement and a website launched that later got taken down. But
the message is still a very good one coming from a company that has
held its own counsel regarding the distribution for many years. Havoc's
suggestion that you check out the Fedora project (http://www.fedora.us) 
is also very good. Those guys are developing packaging standards that 
are likely to be close to those the new RHL project will use. If you can
get your package in there, you'll have a leg up, and it'll keep you 
busy while you wait for RHL to launch.

Regarding vaporware, from this outsider's perspective, opening up the
"consumer" distro (there's got to be a better term for it than that)
appears strategic for Red Hat. They need to engage the broader Open 
Source community, and the way to do that is through opening their 
process. It's strategic because that community is the life's blood of
their business. I know a lot of Linux geeks who hated the idea of RHEL 
with the prices being asked by Red Hat.  But the enterprise initiative, 
in which Red Hat is selling relationships, not bits, allows them pursue 
the  enterprise business and make profits, which will  keep them a
going concern. This means that all the great engineering  they do will 
continue to benefit the broader community since the RHEL work is mostly
GPLd. On the other hand, opening up the non-Enterprise distro gives us 
all a field in which to play in return. Vaporware is a product 
announcement, for something you don't have, intended to freeze your 
market. Microsoft is a past master at this. That's not what Red Hat has
done here. They've announced a strategic realignment of their 
relationship with the Open Source community, that benefits that 
community significantly.  Giving them a little time to get such a
major change done right is common sense..


On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 17:28, John Beimler wrote:
>  Stephen Smoogen wrote:
>  > This is getting asked daily. 
>  > 
>  Must be on a different list, sorry, I don't subscribe to all of Red
>  Hat's lists.
>  
>  > They are working on it. It takes time to deal with concerns from outside
>  > parties and the fact that there are a lot of conferences in the last
>  > month where people were at.
>  > 
>  > Not the answer you want? So sorry.
>  > 
>  
>  I appreciate your polite response. Thanks for being such a good 
>  represenative for the Red Hat Linux community.
>  
>  If they weren't ready to do something about it, they shouldn't have 
>  announced it. The conferences didn't happen on a random dates, they are 
>  planned in advance. Red Hat should be used to working with outside 
>  parties by now, as you know, they've been in business for ten years now 
>  and have worked with a lot of heavy hitters.
>  
>  People are looking for visible signs they are working on it. Customers
>  are looking, and all they see is a web site that got pulled down, and a
>  lot of whiners telling red hat how to run their business.
>  
>  I'm not discussing this as a technical issue, but as a marketing issue.
>  It looks bad. People were all ready to jump in and help, and now thats
>  wearing off as nothing happens.
>  
>   From where I am it looks like a lot of vaopr. I want to see this work, 
>  and I know the developers at red hat do too, but all the waiting and 
>  thrashing is only chasing more and more people and corporate 
>  participants away.
>  
>  
>  Peace.
>  
>  john
>  
>  
>  
>  --
>  Rhl-devel-list mailing list
>  Rhl-devel-list(a)redhat.com
>  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhl-devel-list
>

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003, John Beimler wrote:

> Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> > This is getting asked daily. 
> > 
> Must be on a different list, sorry, I don't subscribe to all of Red
> Hat's lists.
>
> > They are working on it. It takes time to deal with concerns from outside
> > parties and the fact that there are a lot of conferences in the last
> > month where people were at.
> > 
> > Not the answer you want? So sorry.
> > 
>
> I appreciate your polite response. Thanks for being such a good 
> represenative for the Red Hat Linux community. 
Your welcome, thankyou for writing a letter that was so fairly balanced 
and un-critical of any possible problems. 

I am tired of letters that demand perfection from someone else. No one 
is perfect.. we all make mistakes, but we all seem to want to take the 
easy route and demand the impossible from others instead of working on 
ourselves.


-- 
Stephen John Smoogen            smoogen(a)lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Labrador  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 5-8058
Ta-03 SM-261  MailStop P208 DP 17U  Los Alamos, NM 87545
-- So shines a good deed in a weary world. = Willy Wonka --

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 06:55:53PM -0400, John Beimler wrote: 
>  Red Hat needs to move this project forward somehow, perhaps setting
> up a 
>    contribution area, setting up CVS for people, or some other service to 
>  show that Red Hat is serious about this. I'm sure there are a number of 
>  people that would really like to work with Red Hat to make their 
>  distribution the best, only if Red Hat would let us. 
We've said since day 1 that it will take time to set up the
infrastructure for external contribution. We want to plan that
infrastructure in public though, which means we can't set it up prior
to announcing the project.

We have also prioritized finishing the Cambridge release ahead of
working on the infrastructure in earnest.

One way to start participating today is to work on getting your
package into Fedora.

Another way is to start in on the infrastructure issues; simply
posting a good description of what's existing/planned for Fedora or
Debian or whatever for example would probably give us a starting
point, since not all Red Hat developers will be familiar with
everything that's out there.

I believe the key infrastructure issues to be:

 1. allow external bugzilla accounts to modify bugs 
    in order to do triage; allow external default 
    owners for particular components
 2. externally-accessible spec file and source repository
 3. externally-accessible build system
 4. allow external authoring of web content

One issue is already addressed, which is external development
discussion; that's this list and #rhl-devel. Granted development is
pretty boring right now since we're in feature freeze.

Havoc

[Chris Croome]

Hi

On Fri 15-Aug-2003 at 07:47:01PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>  
>  I believe the key infrastructure issues to be:
>  
>   4. allow external authoring of web content 
A Wiki with versioning might be good for some if not all of the web
site?

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome                               <chris(a)webarchitects.co.uk&gt;
web design                             http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/ 
web content management                               http://mkdoc.com/

[Michael K. Johnson]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 10:53:12PM +0100, Chris Croome wrote:
>  A Wiki with versioning might be good for some if not all of the web
>  site? 
Yeah, it might.  A wiki has definitely been one of the things that
we've been considering.  One of the areas that seemed particularly
useful for a wiki is a shared space for discussing hardware
{,in}compatibility, but others are possible as well.

But it will be a bit yet.  One step at a time...

michaelkjohnson

 "He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book."
 Linux Application Development                     -- Ben Franklin
 http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/