Dag Wieers Scoffs at Coordinated Linux Release Proposal

Nic Doye writes "Dag Wieers responds to Mark Shuttleworth's recent request to ask major Enterprise Linux distributions to synchronise releases, claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.' He's confessing to playing Devil's Advocate here, but it is an interesting view from someone with a large amount of experience in the Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS space."

Who really benefits?

claiming that it 'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'

Red Hat has not provided a consumer desktop distribution in over 5 years. It used to be that most new comers were introduced to Linux via Red Hat. I would wager that today most new comers are introduced to Linux via Ubuntu. When those people who are introduced to Ubuntu have an opportunity to influence decisions in the enterprise, I would expect that many (or most, depending on the environment) are recommending RHEL because of the tremendous brand recognition within the IT world. (I know that Red Hat is not the only game in town, but they are far more prevalent in the enterprise and any other distro.) After all "it's all Linux."

So, I would say that Red Hat has already benefited from Ubuntu's run away popularity in the space the Red Hat vacated 5 years ago. What's wrong with a little reciprocity?

Re:Who really benefits?

enough that they had to change the name -- apparently

Could you elaborate?

AFAIK probably the biggest reason Red Hat changed the name to Fedora was to eliminate brand confusion with RHEL.

It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware. Long after the switch to Fedora there were still stores selling Red Hat 9 because they were confused by the whole Fedora/Red Hat/Red Hat Enterprise Linux thing.

Re:Who really benefits?

That's what I don't understand about the name change... unless RedHat intentionally wanted to re-brand Fedora as inferior.

Red Hat said that they are abandoning the desktop market, as it is not profitable. Fedora is not Red Hat, and Fedora is not being abandoned. Fedora is a bleeding-edge testbed for what will be in the next RHEL. That's why there are over 100 MB of updates every week. Just don't run yum update for a week and see it!

The problem with abandoning the desktop, in my opinion, is that many new linux users are first exposed to Ubuntu. When they go to install a server they will then use either Ubuntu Server or Debian. RPM will be foreign to them.

Re:Who really benefits?

This abandoning the desktop talk really annoys me. Desktop is just a buzzword all the while redhat maintains and writes half of gnome and desktop software, where you think network manager came from or pulse audio, the suspend features in gdm, UI, who funds and built freedesktop.org? Just cause they dont have a sticker that says "desktop linux" doesn't mean they abandoned it. look up redhats contributions http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions [fedoraproject.org] sometime.

It's quite simple really they dont want fresh OSS software to be associated with the red hat brand. Fedora will have bugs and be considered "unstable" to many who are looking for no noticeable bugs in thier OS. If fedora was called redhat desktop people would be going around saying i tried to install "red hat" and the instal failed.. they wont differentiate redhat desktop from redhat server in mindshare, it will redhat will lose its brand as a stable serious company. This way I get my fast moving OS and i know what it is, yet newbies wont start branding redhat as a P.O.S cause it didn't install on their emachine.

Re:Who really benefits?

Is there something I'm missing completely here, or are the comments above complete non-sequiturs?

Neither distro you mention, IMHO, is targeting home users in the way that Ubuntu is. You don't see friendly smiling people holding hands, one or two clicks to download, plain english on the front page and so on, to the degree that Ubuntu's homepage has it. You don't get offered free discs (I got 5 once, left them on the coffee-room table and after two months half the department was using Ubuntu).

Opensuse.org: Nice front page, three options - I clicked download - then I look at a complex table and it fails the WifeTest(TM) dismally.

Fedoraproject.org: When I did my WifeTest(TM), she went to fedora.com, then fedora.org (nice pictures of Mario but no distro). Then we found the site and again, she doesn't know what a freakin i386 is. "I have a laptop, does it say laptop?", she says.

Ubuntu.com: she guessed the right domain, clicked download after looking at the screen for a few minutes, then figured "I must have a standard computer" and started downloading. WifeTest(TM) said she would have bought or requested free CD's except she knew I could burn an ISO for her.

They are good, I agree with you - no worse than Ubuntu, probably. But marketing is everything when like is against like.

Re:Who really benefits?

try this lot [microsoft.com]. Their disto still seems fairly popular though

Tell me about it, been trying to get this one working for ages. Firstly, my friend tells me it's only available on bittorrent, instead of just downloading it from their site. Which is a bit weird, but whatever.

Where I'm really having trouble is with the package manager. How do I add a software repository in that add/remove programs thing? It doesn't seem to mention what type of packages are compatible with it either. Am guessing RPM or DEB, but which is it, maybe someone could enlighten me?

To be honest, I'm about to give up on this Windows thing, it's just not ready for the mainstream.

Re:Not big on Fedora...

Sorry to rant, but the implication that Fedora is 'geeky' and Ubuntu is not rubbed me the wrong way.

Rant away! That's part of what Slashdot is for!

The reason I call Fedora "geeky" is that it is, as you say, a rolling beta for RHEL. It's not stable, it's not supposed to be and it never will be. Although its marketing people don't like to admit it, Fedora is bleeding edge. That means it's going to take more work from the users to be productive than it would in a distro that's not changing as fast. I see it as a distro for geeks who like playing with their systems and want to have the newest versions of everything, whether they're really ready or not.

As far as getting mp3 support, and other things like that, I agree with you, but I understand their POV. They want to put out a distro that's free of patent, license or other legal encumbrances, and let the user add those difficult programs on their own. I'd rather they were less stiff about it, but they have strict principles and I'm not going to complain about their sticking to them.

Last, I say that Ubuntu isn't geeky because to me, at least, it's designed for people escaping from Windows. It's easy to install, it brings across your Windows Documents if you ask it, you don't need to remember a root password, and for the most part, It Just Works. Some things that are easy to do in other distros seem to be impossible, such as booting into a fully working system at init 3, but that's probably because the average Ubuntu user will never need to do that except in an emergency, so init 3 is set up for repair only. I know that a Windows user with no understanding of Linux can install and run Ubuntu because I've seen it done. I'd not ask that same person to try it with Fedora!

this again

'is no more than a wish to benefit from a lot of work that Novell and Red Hat are already doing in the Enterprise space.'

odd, it was my understanding that GPL'ed software was supposed to be used, not just by a few. I do understand his concern that Canonical and others should be contributing more useful software to the code base that is available but whining every time some distro uses the code that is available, adds to it and becomes popular is very very un-productive.

Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

Yes. Shuttleworth would benefit from synchronized releases. If there wasn't some advantage for his project, he wouldn't have suggested it. What he's suggesting is that everyone else would benefit too.

Sure, Red Hat puts a lot of effort into hardware support backports. But if Ubuntu, Debian, Novel and Red Hat all standardized on the same kernel releases for their six-month release cycles then hardware vendors would have one platform to target instead of four. That might very well increase vendor cooperation - even to a sufficient extent that Red Hat would get better hardware support than they have now with less investment.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

From what I've seen, hardware vendors only target Novell and Red Hat right now, and Ubuntu and Debian are afterthoughts. And frankly the hardware vendors don't do a very good job of targeting those distro's anyway. I'm in a huge enterprise shop and we're always scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way now when the SW vendors are saying "Yeah, that's available in the kernel now, but it'll be a while before we officially release & support it." We ask the HW vendors about official support from the distro, and they say "Isn't this supposed to be open source? Can't you just build a new kernel that supports this, with these drivers we'll give you?" They don't seem to understand that enterprise shops don't get support from the major distros for custom kernels. Then Sun jumps in every once in a while and says they're going to release their own distro that follows their own (x86) hardware release, just like their SPARC line, but then they fall behind in releasing hardware because it's waiting for the distro... and so it goes. GAH!

We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn. I think vendors just talking to each other would solve half the problem. I don't know what the rest of the solution is.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn. I think vendors just talking to each other would solve half the problem. I don't know what the rest of the solution is.

Not quite sure of that. A fortune 500 company I know has ceased new orders for Microsoft and investing in a Linux desktop. It is at the tender stage where where if the CIO gets a massive pricing cut the program could be nixed an not unixed.

Microsoft is under sever pressure to get it's pricing down and quality up. They falter much more, knowing Linux will be the next fad want to have skill. And those that know Linux, getting Ubuntu, RedHat and SUSE working together is much easier than a NT to AD migration, plain and simple.

Just push Open Office and FireFox to the desktops first, nice and immediate MS-Office savings and a nice prep for the conversion. And if the MS salesperson says "Linux what?" You say the OS we are using to replace MS-Windows. Gets a pretty hefty discount if you can show you mean business. Your company wins either way.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

I'm in a huge enterprise shop and we're always scratching our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way now when the SW vendors are saying "Yeah, that's available in the kernel now, but it'll be a while before we officially release & support it." We ask the HW vendors about official support from the distro, and they say "Isn't this supposed to be open source? Can't you just build a new kernel that supports this, with these drivers we'll give you?" [...] We have to figure out how to tame the chaos. Enterprises are shying away from Linux now because of the churn. All the value that is gained by using cheap x86 hardware is lost in the Engineering churn.

Then you're doing it wrong. I manage a fairly large Enterprise environment, currently 600+ servers that is about 1/3 Linux, and we don't have chaos. We've run Linux in our Enterprise since about 1999, so we're not new to this. And we're currently consolidating another 500+ servers from other parts of the Enterprise, most of which are Linux. We haven't had these problems that you describe. Why? Because we work with our vendors. We don't just buy any hardware, or any config, and hope it will run Linux. Instead, we have a process to order hardware, and we do our homework first. When we purchase hardware that we know will run Linux, we specify to the vendor "Must be certified for RHEL5" or similar. So the vendor will only give us a quote for hardware that we know will work in our environment.

And do you know what happens when we do that up front? Things work.

This is easy because IBM and Dell and all the other (major) hardware vendors know that Enterprise IT shops like yours and mine run Linux. So they work hard to ensure Linux works with the hardware they sell. And at least with IBM and Dell (we use them a lot) they will certify their hardware for several key Linux distros. RHEL is a major distro with a lot of third-party software support (Oracle, WebLogic, PeopleSoft, ...) so it's often certified first.

Heck, at least in the case of IBM and Dell (and I'm sure with other vendors) you can get your Linux support directly from them. One support center if you have problems with the hardware or operating system. And with their third-party relationships, you can often call the same support center for problems with storage (EMC, ..), certain software, networks, etc. (Disclaimer: while this is available to us, we prefer to use Red Hat to support our OS, and the hardware vendor to support our hardware components. This is mainly because it makes purchasing licenses simpler. To get Linux support from IBM or Dell, you need to order your RHEL entitlements from IBM or Dell. As a University, it's actually easier for us to order entitlements separately from Red Hat than to do it as a single purchase through IBM or Dell - alas, that's how our purchasing department works.)

And no, we aren't lagging behind in the latest hardware. When the latest blades came out from IBM, they supported Linux. When the latest multi-core systems came out from Dell, they supported Linux. Everything works great from the moment we take it out of the box. We've never "scratch[ed] our heads, trying to figure out how to make the latest hardware work in a supported way" and we don't compile custom kernels. If that's how you support your Enterprise, you need to re-think what you're doing.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

No, this is not a monolithic vs micro kernel argument at all, this is about upgrading drivers and what that requires in Linux. The Linux kernel already has the architecture for adding drivers at runtime as modules, just like OS X, just like Windows, etc. The difference is, on Linux you can't install new drivers easily if at all without backporting large amounts of code, like Red Hat apparently does for their customers.

Your only options are to try to compile new driver code against the running kernel headers, which doesn't usually work because whole subsystems have changed or are entirely missing, or you can rip out the entire kernel for a new one, which doesn't happen unless you do it yourself, by compiling mainline from source, something IT shops aren't likely to do.

Look at the example i quoted, they are saying new drivers got added to the newest kernel but because of the way the kernel works, large amounts of developer time are needed to get new drivers working on existing systems.

This is quite obviously a problem, but the kernel devs seem opposed to the idea of a stable module ABI, there is even a file in the source tree which says something like "you think you want a stable module ABI, but you really don't" its like a jedi mind trick. I understand perfectly well the implications of supporting a stable module ABI, but its necessary in some cases.

Re:Yea, he wants to benifit - that's the point.

The danger is that if the kernel ABI was stable, then the hardware manufacturers would think they were able to get away with releasing drivers only as binary blobs, without Source Code. This of course is highly undesirable. It also raises the nightmare possibility that repairing a deeply-embedded, totally-overlooked yet potentially fatal bug could cause major breakage. (XP SP2, and Vista UAC, I'm looking at you.)

If you want a stable ABI and binary-only drivers, then fork one of the BSDs. Hell, you can even cage the Source Code up and release the whole kernel binary-only. Recompiling something occasionally is a price I'm quite willing to pay for software freedom.

Group benefit

Synchronizing the major distro releases helps to distribute testing and integration load among the enterprise supported distros while helping upstream developers by giving them fixed integration deadlines. All of that is good for Linux, and helps to keep distros and upstream vendors doing what they're good at, which enterprise loves. Which begs the question: is Red Hat thinking that growing the enterprise Linux space is harmful to its interests?

I'm in agreement with him

I don't think he needs to be playing devil's advocate. I think what he's saying makes a lot of sense.

When an enterprise buys new hardware, they want the software to "just work" on it. It would be expensive for them to do the work themselves, so they are happy to pay someone else to do it. This is the value-added service that Red Hat gives. This is what an enterprise pays for.

It would be ludicrous to give your *competitor* this service for free *before* you give it to your customer. Sure, once you do the work, others can benefit -- that's part and parcel of free software. But you are allowed (I'm going to even say *expected*) to charge for your services.

Because Canonical and Red Hat are going after the same market, it is inevitable that there will be some overlap of effort. If Canonical wishes to use the work that Red Hat does, they merely have to wait until Red Hat releases.

But what worries me more here is that Canonical seems to miss the point where *creating a working distribution* is a money making opportunity. They seem to see it as a loss leader and they will charge for "support"; where "support" means hand-holding the user. Perhaps I'm wrong. I really hope I am.

Until companies understand that providing solutions and creating capability is the service where all the money is, we're not going to see the explosive growth in Free software that I'm hoping for. I had hoped that Canonical understood this. I still hope it's true, but I'm less optimistic.

Mark Shuttleworth's response to competition.

Here is Mark Shuttleworth's insightful response [markshuttleworth.com] when I asked him, "Why would Red Hat cooperate with Ubuntu, especially now that Ubuntu also has its sights set on the server market. Don't they consider Ubuntu a threat?"

Let Shuttleworth sync Ubuntu with RHEL

From my point of view only Ubuntu would benefit from such a synchronized release schedule. Well, I guess then it's best that they change their release cycle to Red Hat's. That's not too difficult to achieve as RH announced its schedules quite early.

So if you want free beer - go and get it yourself!

Re:For us lazy readers...

Who is Wieers? [fosdem.org]
  What did Shuttleworth propose? [markshuttleworth.com]
 
Why he would propose it is sort of the point. RTFA.
 
I don't think it is a big stink. In fact it seems a rather well thought out bit of analysis.

Re:For us lazy readers...

Dag Wieers is known to just about every user of RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, because he and a few other people provide a ton of 3rd part packages that make life more bearable. See:http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages.php

He's also one of the people behind rpmforge, which tries to make a unified repo of 3rd party add-on packages. Previously there were a number of incompatible (dependencies and so forth) repositories like atrpms. Dag's work benefits all of us who use RHEL on a regular basis.

I'm assuming that Shuttleworth proposed that every enterprise distro synchronize the release versions of certain core packages like glibc, mysql, gcc, etc, so that it will be easier for vendors to target linux distros with their software releases. In theory it's a good idea, but not everyone has the same idea of what's important and what the right version to release is.

Re:For us lazy readers...

He's also one of the people behind rpmforge, which tries to make a unified repo of 3rd party add-on packages. Previously there were a number of incompatible (dependencies and so forth) repositories like atrpms. Dag's work benefits all of us who use RHEL on a regular basis.

You forgot to mention that the whole reason that there is an rpmforge is that Dag and co. refuse to operate under EPEL / Fedora's rule: Don't introduce packages that are already in the main repository. As a result, Dag's archive and rpmforge will conflict with the base distribution or EPEL on some packages. Once in a while, I'll grab a spec from Dag and rebuild packages for RHEL/CentOS, but as a matter of policy I don't allow rpmforge repositories to be added to any of my systems. His work does make my life easier. Technically. From time to time. However, suggesting that there are no longer incompatible repositories gives him too much credit, I think.

Re:For us lazy readers...

well ... as one of the lead developers for CentOS, let me tell you that Dag is MUCH more CentOS friendly than EPEL. Users are free to choose which repositories to use ... BUT ... don't confuse Red Hat's corporate interest with good policy. EPEL does not put conflicting packages in EPEL because Red Hat will not allow it and not for any other reason. This isn't bad, CentOS would not exist without Red Hat ... you mischaracterize this issue. Also, RPMFOrge and ATRPMS existed for years before EPEL started, and in fact the reason Dag and other are not members are because EPEL demanded that all the current groups in this space stop what they were doing and instead do what Fedora determined was the proper course. Also ... there is a package called yum-priorities that allows you to prevent having core packages updated if you want to take that approach. The CentOS Project supports Dag's (and ATRPMS as well) in their forming of a new 3rd party repo called rpmrepo .

Re:For us lazy readers...

What you fail to mention is that RPMforge predates Fedora and EPEL by a few years. Between 2002 and 2007 (EPEL) I attracted millions of users using my RPM packages. Packages that existed *before* Fedora came into play. Repositories did not exist back then in the RHEL/Fedora world as they exist today.

When Fedora started I was very interested to help out (read those lists), but nobody within Fedora cared about the millions of Fedora/CentOS/RHEL users I provide packages to and Fedora Extras did not want to support the RHEL/CentOS users at the conception.

Only in 2007 they started to care about RHEL/CentOS users, mostly because Fedora itself is using CentOS for their infrastructure. At that time the Fedora packages were already incompatible with RPMforge packages.

So tell me, what did *I* do wrong here, except caring for my userbase where Fedora didn't.

If the Fedora project wants compatibility, why are they expecting the work to be done by 2 individuals ? I certainly cannot spend that extra effort.

Re:For us lazy readers...

I don't think this level of laziness should be encouraged

Re:For us lazy readers...

Correction: I am a sock puppet for CentOS :)

But seriously, one cannot have his own opinion anymore ?