Double dare ya, Fedora! And your art sucks!

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto <casimiro.barreto at gmail.com> said:
>    I got your point, Fedora is a "teaser" and RHEL is the "real thing",
>    so purchase RHEL. If you test enought in Fedora and find a feature
>    that is "cool", hey don't forget to tell us, so it can be
>    incorporated in the next RHEL...

No, my point was that since RHEL is a commercial distribution, they can
include things that a freely redistributable distribution like Fedora
cannot.  You can compare RHEL to Fedora, SUSE to Debain, etc. and the
comparison still stands.

>    But the final quote is magnificent... M$ and Mr. Gates would love
>    it... for the embeded idea that, in Linux community, UPGRADE/UPDATE
>    is not really an improvement and addiction of qualities and
>    functionalities but may also imply in killing/changing functionality
>    without asking the user if he/she agrees or not with it. And it is
>    real easy to get lost... just what you have to do is a yum update.
>    And the programs that used to work no more will behave the same
>    way... very basic things like character encoding in PHP and so on
>    and so forth...

Read a Microsoft book and you'll see the same sentiment.  You do not
upgrade production servers from one major release to another (which is
more than just "yum update") without prior testing.  Sure, people do it,
and when they get bit by it, they hopefully learn an important lesson.
Microsoft OS resource kits typically have large sections on how to roll
out version upgrades, telling you what might break and how to handle it.

> Wrong. Parts of MySQL are GPL and parts are not.

Wrong.  MySQL is released under the GPL.  MySQL _also_ offers the same
code under a non-GPL license for closed source development (which they
can do since they own the code).  There is also a license exception for
the client libraries that allows Open Source software under certain
non-GPL compatible licenses to link against the MySQL libraries.

> From the MySQL site you 
> can download everything, but it is really trick to compile to fit what 
> is included in Fedora distribution.

Not really, read the Fedora spec file and you can see exactly how to
download bits and build it how Fedora builds it.

> PHP is distributed from Zend 
> Corporation and I really haven't seen if it is or is not GPL, but they 
> distribute it from free out of their site.

PHP is under a different license; see /usr/share/doc/php-[45]*/LICENSE.
It is an Open Source license however.

> The kind of idiot that follows Fedora's site instructions and do a yum 
> update...

"yum update" does not upgrade a system from one major release to
another.

When I plan to upgrade a production system from one version to another,
I test my upgrade path first (and have backout plans ready, also
pre-tested).  It doesn't matter if the server is running Linux, Solaris,
Windows, or anything else.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.