Slightly OT: bad rap for Fedora, and realistic effects

[Robert Locke]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:32 -0600, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> Well I'm not sure how many of you all have seen this:
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/22/207231
> 
> And this may or may not be the correct -list for this, but here goes.
> I think its fair to say that a lot of the louder voices on the
> internet do not like Fedora for fair and unfair reasons. My question
> is what does this do to Fedora, and RedHat by association. I can't
> imagine that anything good is coming of this. All the developers here
> are bound by the 24hr daily limit, ie. there is a finite amount of
> work that any developer can accomplish, esp. those not being paid to
> work on Fedora. Making the assumption that all these negative word of
> mouth is bleeding Fedora of contributors, then what's the plan?
> 
> A few loyalist bound by the laws of Physics can only accomplish so
> much, and I'm even more worried that the bad karma trickles down to
> RedHat, who I believe is the Cinderella of the Linux community - one
> day I hope to be in the position to purchase RHEL licenses, but I'm
> becoming worried that it may not be around by time I get there.
> 
> Peace
> 

The sky is falling, the sky is falling....

I think you misunderstand how open source works.....

The bulk of what is available in Fedora is all managed "upstream" in the
individual projects and simply bundled into Fedora.  The things that are
perhaps unique to Fedora are being contributed to by people who are
unlikely to be swayed by the rumblings of esr and the like.

Those that contribute to the upstream projects will continue to do so
whether they are doing it from a Fedora system or an Ubuntu system or a
RHEL system or a CentOS system or a Debian system or an openSuse system.
I think you get the point.  What's the difference?

The point of OPEN SOURCE is one of choice.  It is, in fact, not a good
thing for everyone to be using RHEL and Fedora.  These two distributions
are providing very SPECIFIC capabilities for very SPECIFIC subsets of
the Linux space.

The beauty of RHEL is being able, as an organization relying on a Linux
server, to call a company that employs many of the developers and
provides superior support (according to any of the software support
surveys done over the last few years).  The fee is for the support.  No
one provides better corporate level support than Red Hat in the Linux
space.

The beauty of Fedora is to provide me, as someone who relies on Red Hat
for my corporate Linux machines, to experience where much of this
technology might be going.  Let's face it, I learn more when stuff
occasionally breaks.  I got to see SELinux grow in Fedora before it
found it's way into RHEL.  I got to see NetworkManager grow a bit
recently before being included in RHEL.  We have seen yum grow a bit
before it finds it's way into RHEL5 (if one is to believe the beta).
And the list goes on....

I have always seen Fedora as a leading edge, closely following upstream
distribution that is ideal for people in the Red Hat sphere of Linux.
Ideal for people who support RHEL or CentOS on their servers.  Ideal for
contributors to the Red Hat universe.  Ideal for the "enthusiasts" of
Linux and true Open Source.  The desire for stability in Fedora is
certainly to be explored but not when we sacrifice forward progress.  In
theory forward progress includes "better software".

The point of "choice" is to allow individual distributions to focus on
different aspects and offer a unique perspective.  For most of us in
Fedora, I think adhering to our "principles" of "free and open" is more
important than being the "choice" of those abandoning Windows....  I do
not think compromising our principles solves the problem of
"closed-source" just to get them on to Fedora.

Is everything ideal?  No way.  Are there things that still need to be
done?  Of course.  Do threads like this and the others over the last
couple of days (ignoring the name calling and politicking) offer
potential for self-examination and improvement?  Sure.  Is Fedora the
perfect distribution for everyone?  I hope not.  Can it be?  No.

I do not think you have to worry about whether or not RHEL will be
around when you can finally afford that support contract....

--Rob