Phil Meyer wrote: > Preference is the only real issue. That is a good thing. > > yes, there is a company behind Fedora that has a very fixed motive for > what it wants out of Fedora. When there is a conflict of interest > between RedHat and the Fedora community, the community CAN win, but > seldom does. That can be both good and bad. Um. What do you have in mind? I can think of five possible areas where the community and the company could be said to be in disagreement. One is that Red Hat will only support Fedora for so long. They've made it quite clear that the community are welcome to support it for longer, and provided infrastructure to enable this. The result was the Legacy project... One is the basic rules of the game. Fedora was set up to be a Free Software only distribution, and won't touch patented software without some sort of legal cover. Eric Raymond doesn't like that, and nor do many other people. They want to turn Fedora into something it isn't -- which they're welcome to do, they just can't call it Fedora and they can't use Red Hat funded infrastructure. And then there's the high turnover of updates. That's much the same thing -- it would be easy for someone with sufficient bandwidth to provide a "security and serious bugfix only" yum repo for supported Fedora distributions, supplying selected official updates. They could probably even call it Fedora. Arguably, there's support for Xen in the Fedora kernels. It's in largely because Red Hat wants it for the RHEL kernels, but Dave Jones (Fedora kernel maintainer) has argued long and loud that it makes his job a lot harder, and makes it harder to update to current kernels. (For example, the latest Fedora kernel is 2.6.19, while 2.6.20 has been out nearly three weeks. This is very largely due to the problem of integrating Xen). Finally, as a result, Dave Jones is very nervous about kernel modules that aren't in the upstream kernel.org tree and aren't in the official Fedora RPMs, considering them virtually impossible to support. I'm not sure that in any area Red Hat "wins" except that there are some things it doesn't want to fund, and other areas where Red Hat funding is limited. It's difficult to argue with that. But the community *certainly* wins -- we've got Fedora! I'd note that there *are* a number of distributions where people have done exactly what I suggest -- taken Fedora and modified it to suit themselves: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions. It's arguable that RHEL fits exactly into that category. James. -- E-mail: james@ | The camel has a single hump; aprilcottage.co.uk | The dromedary two; | Or else the other way around. | I'm never sure. Are you? -- Ogden Nash
