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

Howard Owen hbo at egbok.com
Sat Aug 16 01:07:59 UTC 2003


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 at redhat.com
> http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhl-devel-list
> 





More information about the devel mailing list