Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Otto Haliburton]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-devel-list-admin at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-devel-list-
> admin at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Mark Mielke
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 1:24 PM
> To: fedora-list at redhat.com
> Cc: fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Re: Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction
> 
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 01:35:11PM -0400, MJang wrote:
> > [ To Havoc: ]
> > If I'm hearing you correctly, Red Hat is no longer going to release
> > a Linux distribution every (approx) 6 months. Red Hat will be a part
> > of the Fedora project that will take over this function. And the
> > Fedora project is sponsored as a separate organization under the Red
> > Hat umbrella.
> 
> Here's my take on it: (I'm not a RedHat employee, so I can invent what
> I want, and you can choose to disregard my conclusions as hand waving...
> :-) )
> 
> RedHat isn't breaking even ($$$) by producing RedHat Linux. Not enough
> people are buying it, and the value of being able to release earlier
> to allow for a sort of gamma-testing before introducing the releases (or
> backported patches?) has not been considered valuable enough to make up
> the difference.
> 
> Something had to change. Either RedHat would stop producing RedHat
> Linux, and focus entirely on RedHat Enterprise Linux (noooo!), or
> RedHat would have to reduce the expense of maintaining RedHat Linux.
> 
> Since RedHat Linux is used by developers and enthusiasts, and these
> developers and enthusiasts are not paying for RedHat Linux (as a whole),
> why not allow these developers and enthusiasts to play a more active
> part, giving them the chance to get changes that they want in, while
> allowing RedHat to reduce its expenses related to RedHat Linux? This,
> it appears, was the birth of rhl.redhat.com. Sure, you could look at it
> as RedHat trying to offload work so that it can be more profitable, but
> you could also look at it as RedHat choosing to continue under a more
> open and profitable model, rather than closing down.
> 
> In the end, I don't see a problem with this model. We should all be honest
> about our expectations, and then critical of these expectations. Do we
> really expect RedHat to continue to operate at a deficit to offer us their
> product, without having to provide anything in return? Here is our chance
> to return the favour to RedHat, and at the same time, increase the input
> we have into the direction of RedHat Linux, which will have a greater
> chance
> of determining the direction that RedHat Enterprise Linux takes.
> 
> I didn't finish my take though: It looks as if Fedora approach RedHat and
> made a business case of some sort that resulted in an agreement that
> Fedora
> was already working similar to how RedHat Linux was going to work, and
> that
> the duplicated effort from the community would hurt both communities.
> Members
> would choose a community, rather than merging their efforts. By merging
> the
> products, the two communities are joined, allowing much more efficiency
> integration of work.
> 
> Personally, I like this a lot. I have been looking at Fedora as an
> alternative to RedHat for quite some time, as I prefer to use very
> recently released packages. The only reason I never switched, is because
> I have strong personal and business (my employer) reasons for staying with
> RedHat. Now, I get the best of both worlds.
> 
> So all in all, I'm quite happy with all of the recent events relating to
> RedHat/Fedora Linux. I think if we analyze our expectations without bias,
> this is the only conclusion we can draw (or least, that I can draw).
> 
> I look forward to doing my part...
> 
> Cheers,
> mark
> 
> --
> mark at mielke.cc/markm at ncf.ca/markm at nortelnetworks.com

Actually, RHL is taking the same exit from the open source community that
SCO did.  RHL wants to be commercial and one of the obstacles to being
commercial is to have your source being developed by the open source
community (that doesn't mean that it is bad in anyway), because you don't
control the license or the patent so you are limited as to what you can
charge i.e. RHL can only profit from support and not from the sell of the
product.  So the model is to drop the open source community and adopt a
product which you license and patent and raise the price.  Exactly what SCO
did.