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Eric S. Raymond: Goodbye Fedora, Hello Ubuntu

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Linux

After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my
limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me
into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which
an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system
unusable.

The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository
maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a
failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked
-- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it
depends on and be unrecoverably screwed. But the underlying problems
run much deeper.

Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what
was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market
share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both
technical and political levels.

More Here.

Re: Eric S. Raymond: Goodbye Fedora, Hello Ubuntu--bad link

More Here link is:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01006.html
    ^
It should be:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01006.html
   ^
Not a secure connection protocol -- remove the 's' from https:

In visiting the site of Eric's post and reading the comments, Eric's not getting much sympathy. Many point by point refutations/responses to his complaints.

re: bad link

Works here, but I removed the "s" in case some folks have trouble with it. thanks.

re2: bad link

Susan,
Right, I was at work, and there I'm behind a very restrictive proxy that won't pass many port/protocol variations, so the https original link didn't work for me.

And we care because?

Why do people feel the need to announce to the world that they're leaving one distro to another? (Let alone from one OS to another.)

I started with Fedora Core 3, then to OpenSUSE, after that to Ubuntu, and I've settled down to Arch Linux.

Not in a single instance, did I blog, posted on a mailinglist or in a forum how I'm no longer using a distro and my reasons of fustration for the change. I just did it without saying a word about it.

So while Eric Raymond is telling people how he's switching distros and venting his fustrations of the one he's leaving, what does that got to do with open-source in the overall scheme of things?

Does it benefit open-source in any way, shape, or form? Is it a major progressive leap into the desktop world for Linux, and further loosening the grip of Microsoft's domination? No. Its none of that. Its just one guy switching distros. That's it.

Question is: Why should we care of that?

Shouldn't we be more worried about improving open-source than these trivial things? We should be focusing on improvement and progress. (What can we do something better? And so on). Stuff like Nouveau, KVM, etc...Maybe coming up with better video editing software than we have now? What about trimming the bloatness of Firefox and OpenOffice? etc.

Maybe if we focus on things that actually matter, we'll be able to get somewhere.

Because ESR thinks you should

Read the Wikipedia entry about ESR to understand why he thinks everybody wants to know what he thinks. For example:

In 1997, Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and was a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. ... His disagreement with Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation's views on the ethics of free software in favour of a more market-driven stance has exacerbated some pre-existing tensions in the community.

In a nutshell, there's a camp that strongly advocates having only open-source software in distributions; ESR is in another camp that strongly advocates including proprietary software in distributions, in order to make them more appealing (which is what he means by talking about Fedora's "failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats" -- Fedora has addressed that "problem," just in a way Raymond disagrees with). It's an interesting debate.

But Raymond mainly thinks you care about what he says because he's got a rather large ego.

Some Guy Switches Linux Distributions!

Apparently some guy switched from one Linux distribution to another, throws a fit, and this is news.

Hey, I’ve tried lots of distributions in the past ten years. Does anyone remember Caldera?

Anyway, the important thing in that guy’s rant may be if he raised important issues that Fedora needs to consider.

Let’s see, apparently Fedora has failed to include proprietary media codecs. As Alan Cox says, however, “That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing…” In other words, distributing proprietary software is contrary to the goals of the project.

Full Post.

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