Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2007

Evolution (or) The growth of Fedora

I started to contribute to Fedora(.us) years ago; Fedora has grown a lot since then -- especially now with the merge we are lot more people that have to interact with each other.

What really disappoints me about that: the tone on the mailing lists afaics got and constantly gets worse and unfriendlier (¹). Sure, there were flamewars in the past (and I were part of them as well), but people showed more respect to each other.

I'm not sure if I would start contributing to Fedora today if I would be searching for a project to contribute to.

(¹) -- no, there is not special mail or flamewar that got me to write this blog entry. Just a general impression.

2 Kommentare:

Anonym hat gesagt…

Yeah, sadly I think you're right on the money here. A few months ago I stopped reading most of the Fedora lists; there's simply too much noise and too many angry people.

At the same time, and possibly as a result of this rather hostile environment, there is less and less overarching thinking about what the distro is; to me, right now, Fedora is a (growing) set of RPM's that don't really make up a coherent operating system anymore. A number of people are all like "the more packages the merrier" and even ideas like you can only vote if you maintain N number of packages surfaced. This is of course nicely ignoring that OS development is not about voting or even packaging/spec files.

I feel that Fedora is turning into a Supermarket. That's not _necessarily_ a bad thing if we are just aware of it. The question however is: Are there any successful customers besides server-centric distros such as RHEL, CentOS, other clones? Any desktop ones?

-- davidz

Mace hat gesagt…

I agree. The Fedora mantra is community, but they are actively hostile to ideas "not invented here".

I don't post comments to any of their mailing lists, and I've even stopped reporting bugs to them. It seems pointless when bugs hang around for a year and are closed as "see if it's still a problem in the next release".

I still use Fedora, as I believe they currently have the best security focus. However, if Ubuntu were to integrate Fedora's security layers, I'd happily switch distributions.

I've Used Redhat since the RH4.2 days, switching into Fedora at Fedora Core 1. It sad to see the distribution fade, but that's life. I hope they make the changes necessary to keep them relevant, but if not, Linux will go on.