Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[John Summerfield]

Kelly Miller wrote:
> Although I imagine people don't want to spend too much time feeding the 
> trolls, I want to at least be able to post something showing that I was 
> trying to do the right thing before I write this off as a stupid troll 
> argument. So someone want to point me in the direction of some evidence 
> showing how much of a lie this is?
> 
> "�My guess is that Novell tries to elevate levels of participation in 
> OpenSUSE because that�s the distribution Novell feeds on. It hopes that 
> it can hide in the fog while others do all the labour.�
> 
> This describes exactly what Red Hat does with Fedora. Not that it was a 
> bad thing, as everybody working on or using Fedora is conscious ofusing 
> a bleeding-edge distro.
> 
> So, to explain in more detail: Fedora was meant to help the development 
> of Red Hat�s codebase with the help of the community. Red Hat uses 
> Fedora (good as it may be) purely as a test-bed, where they can try out 
> new technologies that could prove to be too unstable for RHEL without 
> any risk. Fixes from RHEL don�t go upstream to Fedora because the 
> codecase it too different. Not because of evil intent from Red Hat�s 
> side but just because the enterprise-distro and the 
> bleeding-edge-testing distro are too far apart.
> 
> The only part that is really negative about Fedora is that something 
> doesn�t happen before a release that happens before openSUSE-releases: A 
> decided corporate effort at bug-squashing. It doesn�t happen because Red 
> Hat cannot afford to put its complete ressources at de-bugging code that 
> they won�t use for their commercial product anytime soon (while for 
> Novell it makes sense because openSUSE�s code goes back into SLED, soon).
> 
> The result is that Fedora is a fine distro but a bit rough around the 
> edges."
> 


There's not much that's outright wrong there, I wouldn't worry about it. 
You won't convince anyone any more than they will convince you, their 
views are pretty set.

I use both, though mainly Fedora, and some others. I don't see a great 
difference between the Red Hat and SUSE (and Canonical if it comes to 
that) models. All have bleeding-edge projects where the adventurous can 
cut themselves, and stable versions for those averse to pain.

All make a decent effort at bug-fixing and polishing the product. Where 
sensible (eg FC<>RHEL5), I'm sure fixes are shared.


-- 

Cheers
John

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