[ox-en] RedHat and Fedora and SuSE and Novell
- From: Chris Croome <chris croome.net>
- Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 22:18:51 +0000
Hi
The latest version of RedHat will be out this week and it
will be called Fedora 1 not Redhat 10.
There has been lots of negative press regarding the lack
of a RedHat 10 distro with box sets and support for sale
from RedHat, for example:
Red Hat Linux Support To End
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/03/1749259
Red Hat realignment opens door for Red Carpet
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/11/03/2136258
Red Hat tells customers, 'No more freebies!"
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/11/03/1657205
Though not long ago there was a more positive discussion:
Red Hat Linux Project Merges With Fedora
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/22/1712227
Progeny Brings Red Hat and Debian Closer Together
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/10/25/1345240
I think that RedHat opening up the development process to
the community, via Fedora [1] is a great thing.
The exchange value of a Fedora CD set is basically the
cost of producing and shipping them, there is some money
to be made there but not much.
I think this is why RedHat are concentrating on selling
services to businesses.
Fedora is called Fedora in part because of the merger with
the Fedora Linux Project [2], a group who were producing
3rd party RPMs for machines running RedHat and also to
enable the free as in free beer distribution to be
reproduced en mass by anyone without having the hassle or
revoving the RedHat logo before burning the iso's [3].
However Redhat could do what Mozilla does, sell cheap
Mozilla CDs [3] or what OpenOffice.org does, link to
people selling OpenOffice.org CDs [4]. After all RedHat
still sells hats, stickets t-shirts and posters! [5].
I have been lurking and sometimes reading mail on the new
Fedora lists [6] and lots of cool stuff has been
happening, PPC ports, offers to help on
internationalisation, the inclusion of more packages,
support for other updaters like apt and yum and even a
legacy project to support old RedHat versions is being
started.
What is essentially happening here is that the free
software mode of production is asserting it's nature and
getting more into the driving seat -- free software works
best when it is developed in an open and free manner.
In the meantime SuSE has been brought by Novell whome IBM
have taken a big stake in. This get's loads of support and
postive press:
Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/04/1336252
FLASH - Novell buys SuSE
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/11/04/1332252
I don't know what will happen with SuSE, will they realise
that to survive they have to open up their development
process and thus ceed control to the community or will the
hierarchical command structures of capital try to hang on
to this distrubtion?
Chris
References
1. http://fedora.redhat.org/
2. http://www.fedora.us/
3. http://fedora.redhat.com/about/trademarks/guidelines/
4. http://store.mozilla.org/
5. http://distribution.openoffice.org/cdrom/
6. http://www.redhat.com/apps/commerce/coolstuff.html
7. http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/communicate/
--
http://chris.croome.net/
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