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<nettime> Capture, Capital - Red Hat's flight to Fedora [2x]



Table of Contents:

   Re: <nettime> Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning (fwd)    
     Brett Shand <brett@earthlight.co.nz>                                            

   Is Capital taking over Linux?                                                   
     Chris Croome <chris@croome.net>                                                 



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Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 19:26:01 +1300
From: Brett Shand <brett@earthlight.co.nz>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning (fwd)

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003 14:21:47 -0500 (EST), Alan Sondheim wrote:

> I find the following strangely disconcerting, as a major linux
> provider slides out from its customer base. For some this would
> indicate a growth and maturity of the community - for most of us,
> it already implies a problematic development of open source
> community.

Why is it problematic Alan?

It seems to me (without any special knowledge, I hasten to say) that 
it's two separate markets and that Redhat has seen the difference 
between the two.

Enterprise wants a slow moving, very stable platform and RedHat thinks 
it can provide that and hopes that the market is big enough. It's 
going to leave the fast moving desktop market, which is very hard to 
service and keep stable, to work itself out.

If that is so, and if it works, then it seems to me that everybody 
wins.

Brett


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Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 23:04:41 +0000
From: Chris Croome <chris@croome.net>
Subject: Is Capital taking over Linux?

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Hi

The following article is also available here:

  Is Capital taking over Linux?
  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/sheffield/2003/11/279908.html

The latest version of Red Hat Linux will be out this week
and it will be called Fedora 1 not Red Hat 10, also SuSE
Linux has just been brought by Novell and this has been
bankrolled by IBM. What is happening here and what does it
mean for the world's most popular versions of the free
GNU/Linux computer operating system?

Red Hat is the world's most popular GNU/Linux
distribution, SuSE is probably the 3rd or 4th most popular
(2nd being Mandrake and 3rd or 4th being Debian)

There has been lots of negative press regarding the lack
of a Red Hat 10 distro with box sets and support for sale
from Red Hat, 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 Red Hat 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 Red Hat 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 Red Hat and also to
enable the free as in free beer distribution to be
reproduced en mass by anyone without having the hassle of
removing the Red Hat logo before burning the isos [3].

However Red Hat 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 Red Hat
still sells hats, stickers, 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 Red Hat versions is being
started.

What is essentially happening here is that the free
software mode of production is asserting its 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 whom IBM
have taken a big stake in. This gets 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 cede 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/

- - -- 
Free Software may be the foundation of a new economy
http://www.oekonux.org/
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