Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Sean Middleditch]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 14:33, Jos Vos wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 10:53:39AM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
> 
> > That's looking at the empty half of the bottle. :-)
> > 
> > If you look at the other half, it reads like this:
> > The Fedora Project is sort of a "truly open" Linux distribution, a la
> > Debian, with little control from commercial entities. This should put a
> > stop to the "commercially bastardized Linux" criticisms (at least in
> > theory).
> 
> Well, as you say, we already have Debian (and many other "truly open"
> community distributions).  We also have many "not completely open"
> commercial distributions (fill in the names yourself).  And we had
> a (truly?) open commercial distribution: Red Hat Linux.  IMHO this
> is what we seem to loose now: a fully open distribution, but still
> controlled by a single entity (company).  Red Hat Linux played this
> role, between the community distributions and the not-completely-open
> commercial distributions.  So I still think we *do* loose something.

I don't know, maybe you just haven't actually read the site
completely... Redhat is keeping complete control over the Core of the
project, with the end editorial review, no guarantees or promises that
anything will be done by consensus, etc.  They're just saying, "ya, we
control it, but we're going to let the community help shape the distro
they way they want.  just so long as its not anything we see as
blaringly stupid."

My *only* regret about this move is that as there is no commercial boxed
distro, RedHat is no longer at all anything that I can recommend to
people to pickup in a store and tryout, and thus I'm going to have to be
recommending them to RedHat competitors like Lindows or something.

Oh well.

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis at awesomeplay.com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.