Having just scanned through the release notes on fedora core 0.94O I am
extremely pleased. The direction this is heading looks pretty good to
me, pre-linking, ACPI, cyrus 2, vnc install, http or ftp graphical
install, UTF8 default, postfix 2, up2date supports apt,yum (new?) ...
It looks like they are loosening the belt some, not a gentoo amount but
a reasonable amount in my opinion. Most of what they are cutting out is
OLD legacy stuff that while many people use they probably should not. I
can't blame redhat for taking this route, if I had to continue to pay
people to maintain backward compatibility and backport fixes for SASL
1.x libraries that alone would do me in. Redhat has spent a fortune on
things like that, that bring them little of any tangible revenue.
The classic problem with redhat has always been a "can't please
everyone" situation. From what I have read in redhat's filings and now
with this release it seems clear to me that they are saying something
more like:
*We will continue to contribute heavily to the Linux community
*We have the fedora core offering for people who are interested in
staying modern with Linux and have a fair risk tolerance
*If you have a low risk tolerance you can pay us to manage old software
for you
*We have a lot of great consulting expertise
I think the short term fallout with this will be bad for a while though.
Many small businesses and such who have come to depend on the good will
of RedHat now need to carefully plan how they will maintenance their
software and who or if they need to pay to do so.
We manage several of our own distributions internally and I can say
unequivocally it is hugely expensive, we have a hardened redhat 8, a
desktop redhat 9/XD2 and a debian testing based setup. This effects us
because we now in the future we will need to do integration work pulling
packages from fedora core, and redhat es platform and repackaging for
those dists. As a result we will incur some additional costs but not to
significant and we may break even on it by selling it out to others in
similar circumstances, thats the beauty of the GPL. But the lesson here
is that the binary Linux "free ride" never really existed in quite the
way some thought it did, the upside is that I think Redhat has put
together a very good plan on all of this, still time to execute poorly
but I wish them the best of luck.
Sincerely,
David Uhlman
CTO 50KM Inc.
Thu, 2003-09-25 at 11:13, liberty young wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 10:30, keith smith wrote:
> > I don't get it. What real R&D is there for a distribution?
>
> A Ton...if you want somebody to test and patch the latest utilities and
> programs, then you need to pay them. Sometimes, i wonder if they follow
> that model (gcc latest-bleeding-edge on a boxed release?)..Also, i'm
> sure that they have a staff of linux-kernel hackers....RPM and it's
> technologies are starting to get better, so i'm sure that they are
> paying a staff to work on that (god, i hope so).
>
> All of that aside, it's a huge pain in the ass to maintain a Distro. You
> have users demanding that you pre-package utilities that would only take
> 20 minutes at the most to compile yourself. You have to keep a staff who
> just watches the security-focus mailing lists and fixes bugs and pushes
> them up to your servers. And god forbid if they have to just compile
> their own kernel.
>
>
> I know Debian just recently announced for an aggresive push for a Sarge
> release in December, but that will only come through charisma and
> dedication of the part-timers...most of the work will probably come with
> those who can devote 10 hours a day on that.
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/debian-devel-announce-200308/msg00010.html
>
>
> Don't get me wrong...i'm not bashing the Open Source Model..i'm pretty
> sure that Debian will make that target, or miss it by only a month. I'm
> just pointing out that their is REAL work, dollars, and R&D to be done
> when putting your name on a Linux Distro.
>
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