On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 07:35:48PM +1100, Amos Shapira wrote: > This is in contrast to Fedora, for instance, or even what I heard > about Ubuntu, where the process through which the packages have to go > in order to be found in a "stable" release is apparently less > adequate.
That was the whole idea of Fedora. RedHat found that due to their plan of producing a new release every 6 months, and constant updates, their product was not very reliable. Once they went public, they could no longer have the long beta times they did when they first started. So they split their products into two, RHEL, which would be a long term product, with long beta times, a long support life, and so on. Fedora was supposed to be what Red Hat Linux had become, a community supported product with supervision, but not control. This meant they had to abandon their original business plan which was to package linux and make people think that "Red Hat" was Linux. They planned on selling boxes to people. RHEL was sold as a product including support. So when you bought it, you bought a support contract. Recently Red Hat has "entered" the desktop market, trying to spruce up Fedora and make it what people would want to buy. They hope people will buy it. As I write I am this upgrading one computer to Fedora 8, which was downloaded via Bittorrent. No Red Hats were harmed (or paid). Ububtu is totally a community supported effort. In order to reach the masses, third parties are encoraged to sell support. If that pricing model works or not, is another question, it has not done well in the past. Too many people "buy" the product for nothing and assume since they paid nothing for it, it has no cash value. IMHO Ubuntu also suffers, but not as badly from the bloat (we want to give you everything) and short release times (to keep in the press) as Fedora. Ubuntu is very nicely packaged, and I have found that Windows users can adapt to it far quicker than Fedora or Suse. I don't like their distribution model, which is a single CD and then as much as 3 gig of downloads to get a (near) complete system. With Fedora, I downloaded a DVD image once and can install it on computers without having to download lots of updates, but I can't do the same with Ubuntu. Personaly, I'm also not happy with their support, I had a kernel problem with the PPC version, which when I installed it was already documented for a month. It has been several months and there has been no updated kernel. The computer I installed it on did not have enough free disk space to install the development tools and recompile a kernel. Debian has not fallen ill with the same disease because the people running the project keep the stable and the new product trees seperate. This does cause problems for people who want updated software the unstable tree eventualy gets so far out of sync that packages from it can not be installed on the stable tree. IMHO the root cause is the GPL. If I were going to SELL a product, I would want a more restrictive open source license, one that does not allow competition. In plain English, you can do what you want with the source code in the privacy of your own home, but you could not sell a product based upon it. This almost sunk RedHat because they had planned on selling boxes of product for $99, while other people were selling the same product (but not the book or support) for as little as $2. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
