Digimer writes:
On 2018-11-03 10:49 a.m., Wolfgang Pfeiffer wrote:
> Legally that may be correct. But who's the main sponsor for Fedora? [1]
> And usually the guy who pays for the orchestra decides for the tunes
> that are played. Correct?
No, not correct. Red Hat funds a lot of projects, simply to ensure they
survive and thrive but then stays hands-off. Fedora, Centos and
countless other projects included. They know they can't make decisions
as well as the people at the front of a project, so they leave them be
and simply pick off the parts that help them.
So tell me, how exactly did we wind up with systemd, that landed with a thud
years ago, without anyone being able to point their fingers, exactly, at the
big community demand for it?
If Red Hat truly stayed "hands off", the systemd garbage would've withered
and died a long time ago. There was a lot of handwaving about all the big
and useful features it had, but that's about it, but the actual details were
curiously scant.
> The people "working on it", you write. I note the
difference to people
> "working with it" ... ;)
Most Fedora developers are users as well. Example; I live in the HA
cluster world, mostly dominated by Red Hat (with an honourable mention
Right. Now, I have better things to do on a day to day basis, so I could be
wrong on the following, but it's my impression that Red Hat has a healthy
percentage of Gnome developers on their payroll, if not an outright majority
of them. Tell me that I'm wrong, and Red Hat does not have more say than
anyone else, insofar as Gnome development goes.
Which is why KDE is getting the boot.
> Plus:
> As Fedora is more or less directly linked to RHEL [2] - what financial
> sense does it make for Redhat to support the work on KDE if even now
> already RHEL deprecates KDE?
Fedora is arm's length and independent. RH sees the value / ROI on
knowing they have a reliable place to build RHEL from, nothing more.
Every RHEL release takes some version (or two) off of Fedora as a base.
Once they have that base, they start heavily modifying it.
There's certainty some value in having an army of unpaid volunteers doing QA
for you. And the longer they continue to believe that they have any say in
the larger roadmap, the better.
One of the top concerns, since RHEL 6, has been to streamline what
RH
support is liable for. If there are two projects that provide
effectively the same thing, one will be dropped. This is purely for
reducing support liability. We say this with Xen being dropped in EL6 in
favour of KVM/qemu, for example.
Right. And since Red Hat has more control over Gnome than KDE, is there any
mystery as to which one got the boot?
I suspect that is the same motivation for dropping KDE. Gnome is
more
popular and provides a GUI,
Last time I checked, so did KDE. It's called Qt.
so why pay developers and support staff to
support KDE in RHEL as well?
Right, makes no sense.
The majority of GUI users on RHEL are
"Workstation" systems, which don't generate them much money (compared to
full RHEL) and are largely corporate, where standard builds are the norm.
This is not a conspiracy again KDE, it's simply business.
Right. And one very desirable thing that every business with an established
customer base looks for is vendor lock-in. systemd is vendor lock-in, with
Red Hat owning pretty much all technical knowledge of that hairball. Gnome
is being groomed to the same end result. At some point it'll have the same
cozy relationship with Red Hat that systemd does now.
Fedora, not
being a source of income for them and being arm's length, will be left
free to do and support whatever they want.
That would only be true if Fedora incurs no expense to Red Hat. Perhaps some
minimal expense on the account of KDE will be tolerable. But I don't think
it would take a lot for KDE to leave via the same door where systemd came in.
Who knows, maybe someday it
will make sense to swap out Gnome for KDE as the official GUI? Leave it
to the community and let time tell.
Never going to happen. Of that, I'm certain.