[NTLUG:Discuss] Giving Up On FEDORA

[Thomas Cameron]

On 01/06/2010 08:17 AM, Greg Edwards wrote:
> I gave up on RH distributions a long time ago.  I truly appreciate the 
> contribution that RH made to the Open Source community in the beginning. 

"In the beginning???"  Who do you think today's #1 contributor to X.org
is?  How about the #1 commercial contributor Linux kernel?  And glibc
and the associated toolchain (gcc and friends)?  It's Red Hat.  Red Hat
does more for Linux and Linux distros than any organization on the
planet.  I am constantly blown away at how quick folks are to trash talk
Red Hat since they're at the top of the heap.  It just amazes me how
folks who are obviously ignorant of the facts spew crap like this.

>   Then again the ultimate motivation was their IPO and cashing in.  

You're in serious need of an intense application of a clue-by-four.  You
have *no* idea what you're talking about.  Red Hat has paid over half a
*billion* dollars in acquisitions and then turned around and given that
technology to the community.  GFS and Cluster Suite came from the
Sistina acquisition.  Red Hat bought the Netscape server line from AOL
and then turned around and freed up Directory Server and Certificate
System.  The list goes on and on.

On top of that, Red Hat has also done things like driving the
development of One Laptop Per Child, which was to a great degree the
driving force behind the evolution of the netbook market.  Red Hat has
flown executives and attorneys all over the globe to testify at
government hearings about the evils of software patents.  Red Hat fought
SCO via amicus briefs.  Red Hat is a contributing member of the Linux
Standards Base.

Red Hat has also been a driving force behind things like LVM and CLVM
for Linux, the NSS crypto libraries, developed and contributed the
Native Posix Threading Library, is the driving force behind SELinux and
a ton of other technologies.

See http://people.redhat.com/tcameron/.RHAT-and-OSS-Community/ and
specifically
http://people.redhat.com/tcameron/.RHAT-and-OSS-Community/img7.html to
understand Red Hat's devotion to Open Source.

Also see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions for an even
longer list of the contributions Red Hat has made to the community.

<snip>

> If you want an extremely user friendly (non techie) distribution, I'd 
> suggest Mandriva.  With a KDE desktop, even my wife is comfortable 
> managing it.  My last Mandriva upgrade was 2008 so I cannot totally 
> vouch for the current release.  But I haven't heard of any major 
> screaming from the user base.

My daughters have been using Fedora their entire lives.  My oldest just
turned seven and my youngest, three.  My wife, who is a Windows admin by
profession, has started using my daughters' Fedora box more and more
lately as Windows makes her madder and madder.  With even a small amount
of common sense, Fedora is incredibly easy to maintain.

-- 
Regards,
Thomas