[NTLUG:Discuss] Red Hat Offerings -- the Red Hat bashing tour is back!

[Cameron, Thomas]

> > -- Nothing quite says "leper" like sponsoring a
> > totally free distro and
> > having an engineering team work on it.
> 
> "help, but only from a distance"
> 
> That's very much like a leper colony actually.

How on Earth is it help "from a distance?"  The Fedora team works for Red Hat, for Heaven's sake.  They develop and package code, QA it and release it into Fedora for community review and improvement.  Then they take that same code and when it is totally solid they include it into RHEL.  You can submit bugs and bugfixes through Bugzilla and Red Hat employees (and others) address them.  How much closer do you want them to be???

> > -Just a thought
> 
> Take away the trusted name and you might as well
> install Debian. 

You just refuse to listen - Fedora is a Red Hat sponsored project.  Everyone knows it - the Fedora folks know it, the community knows it, the web and ftp sites are on redhat.com servers and the contacts are almost all user at redhat.com e-mail addresses.

While I respect the Debian project folks immensely, trying to say that Fedora == Debian is just silly.  Debian is *strictly* volunteer based.  Again, I find this amazing and very impressive, but it isn't at all the model that Fedora follows.  Fedora is a corporate sponsored distro developed primarily by paid developers.

> This is the point. This is why this
> split is problematic for the PHB crowd 

I haven't seen any of the "PHB crowd" have a problem with the split.  You tell them "here's a free version that has community support, and here's a commercial version with paid support.  Choose how much you want to spend based on the level of support you want."  That makes perfect sense to the "PHB set."

Let's be realistic - many if not most users of Red Hat Linux got it for free so they didn't *have* paid support.  Fedora just continues that model.  The ones who paid for it are already comfortable with the "pay for support" model.  Again, they are just continuing down the same path they were previously on.

It strikes me that the only person who has a problem with the name change is you, even though all of your arguments have been answered very reasonably.  What is it about Red Hat that *really* upsets you?  I get the impression that you are on a crusade against Red Hat and *anything* they do is going to draw your ire.  What is the real cause of your anger towards them?  Did they reject you for employment, or reject a patch you submitted or something?  Or is it just the "attack the guy at the top of the heap" thing?

> even if it won't bother those for whom Redhat was their second
> distro back at version 3.0.3.

Version 3.0.3???  What a newbie - no wonder you're so confused!  Why, back in my day we wrote inode tables directly to disk by hand, using old speaker magnets!  :-)

Have fun,
--
Thomas Cameron, RHCE, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Assistant Vice President
Linux Design and Engineering
Bank of America
(972) 997-9641

The opinions expressed in this message are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, Bank of America.