[CLUE-Tech] Fedora vs Debain

[Angelo Bertolli]

I'm sorry, I have to make another response to this.  This is an issue I 
feel strongly about.

> For me it comes down to one word: Freedom.
>
> I Oct I sat in on a meeting of admins at Department of Energy.  They 
> were very upset that Red Hat (their distro of choice) had pulled the 
> rug out from under them and was requiring license fees they could not 
> afford.

This is "free as in beer" not "freedom."  Freedom under the GPL has 
nothing to do with license fees.  Freedom means you have the source code 
to make your own improvements and continue your own development.  So 
yes, if they're willing to do that they can avoid paying any more 
licensing fees.  But if they want Red Hat to do work, then Red Hat 
deserves to get paid.  If Red Hat is asking too much then they can find 
another distro... and if they're talking about possible non-GPL'ed 
programs in Red Hat Enterprise, well then they can either do without 
those parts or admit that Red Hat did a good job at developing their 
software.  However, I doubt there is really any critical piece of 
software that they MUST have from RH.

> As I sat and listened I was reminded of the GNU Manifesto.  The 
> complaints sounded exactly like those that led RMS to start the FSF.

And the FSF, while prefering "free as in beer" also admits that Freedom 
is more important and as such you should have the freedom to price as 
you see fit.

> For that matter, when I picked a distro to learn a few years ago I 
> picked Debian because it seemed that free downloads/updates from Red 
> Hat were provided out of the goodness of their hearts.  I didn't want 
> to get locked in to something that would eventually be available 
> retail only.

I really don't see the difference between Fedora and the old "Red 
Hat"... hell they even have "Red Hat" annoyingly branded everywhere!  
And if they try to stop providing service via Fedora... there WILL be a 
fork.  In fact, I believe the Fedora project was taken over by them from 
another group who was trying to produce a kind of "Red Hat" clone or 
something.

> As it turns out, the DoE guys didn't have a clue about what Fedora 
> would be and their pain is not nearly what they made it out to be, I 
> think. Threads here have made that clear.  But their complaint in the 
> end was "our vendor changed our price structure," to which I said "get 
> a vendor that won't do that to you."

I saw this little "trick" coming that Red Hat played long ago too.  I 
mean it was totally obvious that they were building up a dependance on 
their software.  But the fact that they are so successful has given the 
Linux community a lot of good software, and a friend with a little more 
pull and power than a distro like Debian.  I agree with Debian's 
philosophy, but without good income look at how they lag behind.  I'm 
actually quite pleased that Red Hat has contined with Fedora... I half 
expected them to just drop us.  However, I also figured someone would 
pick it up where they left off.  When you have a distro as popular as 
Red Hat, you know you aren't going to be left in the dark without any 
help.  That's what's great about the open source community.

> The sad thing was that one lab had 2 full time guys who did nothing 
> but compile the RH Enterprise SRPMs so they could run RHE without 
> "paying" for it.  If those two guys had done Debian development to 
> make Debian as good[1] as RH, we all would benefit.  Ah well, my tax 
> dollars at work.
>
> To me there are significant parallels between Linux vs. Windows and 
> Red Hat vs. Debian.
>
> [1] "Good" in the eyes of DoE, not to suggest that RH is better than 
> Debian.

Well if it's not, then why don't they just switch ;)  In fact, after my 
recent experiences for a distro who is still lost with a 2.2 kernel, I 
think I would technically consider RH better than Debian.  I'm not 
trying to flame at all.  I'm being as objective as possible.  I WISH so 
much that Debian had the kind of development power that RH has.  I wish 
Debian was as cutting edge.  I love the Debian philosophy.  But I guess 
it all boils down to that even though "code as compensation for your 
work" is a nice theory, you still have to eat.  People who develop for 
Red Hat get to eat AND do what they love!  If the Debian people want to 
eat, sometimes they have to give up doing what they love.  I know it's a 
sad world.

Angelo