Read Havoc Pennington's answer. It's reasonable, and I believe he's
telling the truth. If he is, what's the beef?
Obviously there was some confusion at Red Hat in that there was an
announcement and a website launched that later got taken down. But
the message is still a very good one coming from a company that has
held its own counsel regarding the distribution for many years. Havoc's
suggestion that you check out the Fedora project (
http://www.fedora.us)
is also very good. Those guys are developing packaging standards that
are likely to be close to those the new RHL project will use. If you can
get your package in there, you'll have a leg up, and it'll keep you
busy while you wait for RHL to launch.
Regarding vaporware, from this outsider's perspective, opening up the
"consumer" distro (there's got to be a better term for it than that)
appears strategic for Red Hat. They need to engage the broader Open
Source community, and the way to do that is through opening their
process. It's strategic because that community is the life's blood of
their business. I know a lot of Linux geeks who hated the idea of RHEL
with the prices being asked by Red Hat. But the enterprise initiative,
in which Red Hat is selling relationships, not bits, allows them pursue
the enterprise business and make profits, which will keep them a
going concern. This means that all the great engineering they do will
continue to benefit the broader community since the RHEL work is mostly
GPLd. On the other hand, opening up the non-Enterprise distro gives us
all a field in which to play in return. Vaporware is a product
announcement, for something you don't have, intended to freeze your
market. Microsoft is a past master at this. That's not what Red Hat has
done here. They've announced a strategic realignment of their
relationship with the Open Source community, that benefits that
community significantly. Giving them a little time to get such a
major change done right is common sense..
On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 17:28, John Beimler wrote:
Stephen Smoogen wrote:
> This is getting asked daily.
>
Must be on a different list, sorry, I don't subscribe to all of Red
Hat's lists.
> They are working on it. It takes time to deal with concerns from outside
> parties and the fact that there are a lot of conferences in the last
> month where people were at.
>
> Not the answer you want? So sorry.
>
I appreciate your polite response. Thanks for being such a good
represenative for the Red Hat Linux community.
If they weren't ready to do something about it, they shouldn't have
announced it. The conferences didn't happen on a random dates, they are
planned in advance. Red Hat should be used to working with outside
parties by now, as you know, they've been in business for ten years now
and have worked with a lot of heavy hitters.
People are looking for visible signs they are working on it. Customers
are looking, and all they see is a web site that got pulled down, and a
lot of whiners telling red hat how to run their business.
I'm not discussing this as a technical issue, but as a marketing issue.
It looks bad. People were all ready to jump in and help, and now thats
wearing off as nothing happens.
From where I am it looks like a lot of vaopr. I want to see this work,
and I know the developers at red hat do too, but all the waiting and
thrashing is only chasing more and more people and corporate
participants away.
Peace.
john
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