Wanna give me a hand debunking this?

[Les Mikesell]

John Summerfield wrote:
> 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.

The piece that it misses is that there are (so far...) 3 releases of 
fedora for every RHEL.  As the RHEL cut time approaches, fedora becomes 
increasingly reliable, so RH resources are doing something.   However, 
after the cut (which will have pretty much the same versions of 
everything the concurrent fedora has minus some kernel features), fedora 
returns to its wild and crazy ways for its next 2 releases.

Another thing is misses is that RHEL releases its sources in a way that 
lets other projects (CentOS, etc.) reuse them. I don't follow Novell 
that closely, but didn't think that there were any free rebuilds of 
their enterprise versions.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com