[TriLUG] Open Source Empowerment

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 10:45, Greg Cox wrote:
> > I don't understand how the decision to make RHL less commerical,
> > and into more of a community-driven open source project, affects
> > its technical qualities.
> 
> IMO, it calls into question its stability.  Which I'll go ahead and
> cop to: that's FUD because we've not hit steady state with Fedora.
> 
> With RH letting go of the reins, I don't have a warm fuzzy that my
> not-work servers are going to be secure, happy, and stable.  

They are not "letting go" of any reins -- this is part of the FUD.  They
are merely allowing outside contributions and support, but the "reins"
are still firmly held by Red Hat.  It is a meritocracy, not a
democracy.  The project leader is a Red Hat manager; the steering
committee is all Red Hat employees.

Please re-read http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html and
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/leadership.html

> Fedora
> may be the greatest thing since the Frappuccino, but at this point
> I don't know how well/how long it'll be supported.  The high
> release cycle could mean poking my head up every 2-3 months to do
> an OS patch, assuming there won't be a long series of eratta patches
> like we've had.

Well you probably have at least 6 months if you want to stay with Red
Hat provided patches; Fedora Legacy will allow for longer cycles. 
Personally I'm not nearly as scared of OS upgrades as others, but YMMV.

> RHL walked a nice line between MUST HAVE LATEST NOWNOWNOW (which
> is my impression of Debian's unstable tree) and "I could pass this
> box to my children and it'd still work" (i.e. RHEL).  It worked well
> for home and small office without needing to fork over for RHEL or
> be always upgrading.  And now, that niche feels unfilled.

I personally think that Fedora, with its whole set of Core, Extras,
Legacy, will fill this niche more than anything else previously.  I hope
I am correct, only time will tell for certain.

--Jeremy

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| Jeremy Portzer        jeremyp at pobox.com      trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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