"FC6 was the final release of Fedora Core."

[Ric Moore]

On Mon, 2006-11-20 at 13:03 -0600, Michael Hipp wrote:
> Net Llama! wrote:
> > http://wtogami.livejournal.com/11707.html
> 
> Well, can't accuse them of standing still.
> 
> Wonder what will replace it and the rationale behind it?

>From what I read and what I used to know first-hand with RedHat, they
never stand still. Matthew Szulik is TALL -and- intelligent, so he's
used to moving straight forward in linear fashion with nothing getting
in his way. With all the pressure on, he's in his element. He's
aggressive in his business and assertive, with an eye to compromise, in
his personal relations with those who around and for him. One Helluva
guy and he's equal to this task, you betcha.

"Essentially all packages will become maintained in a manner similar to
today's Extras project, but with more sophisticated controls, process
and policy automation. Core will merge into Extras, creating one big
distribution maintained by both RH engineering and Fedora contributors.
The name for the new distribution is currently undecided, but may just
be called "Fedora"." 

This sounds like sorta going back to the old days, where there was one
RedHat distro, with different levels of support, with more emphasis on
gaining the hearts and minds of the average user. A rant I posted a
month or so ago on the Fedora list, was the need to get this back. The
RedHat Expo also needs to be re-started too. I think FC6, from what I
have read, is the end of the torrid development process with just a few
wrinkles to be ironed out to have a rock solid LARGE installation...
that does just about anything anyone could want, bar none. The
infrastructure is there, no doubt about that either. Combining FC6 with
a legal fully functional open source Java kit from the horse's mouth,
would be the end-all of all publicly available linux distributions.
These guys will compete when it comes to acquiring the good stuff and
then giving it away. It's a win-win from an outfit that does play fair
and gives as good or better than it gets. 

It's one thing to grab the latest tar-balls to redistribute, but to pay
developers good money and invest in leading edge companies, RedHat puts
their money where their mouth is. No doubt about that. They have the
track record of YEARS, not months, and have never veered off course
since the latter 1990's. Larry Ellison? The guy with the sailboat? Who's
he? No problemo. MySQL beats the pants off of Oracle any day of the
week, especially in the published benchmark tests I've seen. It's a
pig. 

What's Gates gonna do? He got in bed with an outfit one foot in the
grave. Big deal. I think he thinks he suckered them when they thought
they suckered him. Maybe they suckered him into thinking he suckered
them while they thought they suckered him. Got it? Who knows? I doubt
either party got the proverbial reach-around. The real reason he doesn't
go after RedHat openly is the same reason we won't go after Iran. The
loss from such an action would be heavier than any gain we could ever
hope to have. It would be -insane-. Like I was carefully taught, never
ever mess with a truly angry person. His adrenaline is way up and he'll
feel no pain, while he's beating your head in. If you're the one that
made that person truly angry, he'll have a clear cut goal to his
adrenaline fueled  retaliations. No, Gates plays sneaky poker, and he'll
not directly confront anyone. 

I would be willing to bet that, though they would be strange bedfellows,
Ubuntu, RedHat, Slackware and Debian would circle the wagons if one of
them got an amount of pressure from MicroSoft. Then you would see some
truly angry folks who would feel no pain while striking back. If these
major distros would standardize their directory structures, there would
be no weak links if the wagons had to circle up quickly. It might be
better for all of us if they started in that direction. Suppose RedHat
stayed mainly in the server market with support contracts, and handed a
large chunk of Fedora development to Ubuntu while keeping a hand in it
for eventual server use from the Fedora burn-in and development while
benefiting from a much larger cohesive user base? And Slackware / Debian
moved towards Ubunto? Servers / Users, all running Linux. The bases
covered, the wagons and markets tightened and circled. Sounds simple to
me. The Third World needs free software, the users that come of it will
demand Linux in their workplaces as that is what they are used to. Same
as over here, when college students emerge into the work place, they
will demand what they use at home. Then the device manufacturers will
need only develop a driver once to fit on any Linux installation. 

So, I think ole Matthew is aware of this. I needled them on this over a
month ago on the Fedora List. Let's see what happens. Ric