[Mon Mar 26 12:18:51 CEST 2007]

I spent the whole week last week in London attending some cluster training sessions, and didn't have much time to check the technology news. So, checking things around today, I read that Eric Raymond publicly announced that he was giving up on Fedora, which certainly angered some people out there (some of them perhaps because they even failed to read Raymond's announcement carefully, as we will see below). Here is the core of ESR's reasoning:

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 marathob of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.

The proximate auss 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. They have included, but were not limited to:

* Chronic governance problems.

* Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.

* A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.

* Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate —then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.

* Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.

* Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

(...)

I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them. Canonical's recent deal with Linspire, which will give Linux users legal access to WMF and otehr key proprietary codecs, is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in. Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.

So, a good portion of Raymond's reasons to abandon Fedora and switch to Ubuntu are actually political in nature. Among these, the refusal to support any proprietary multimedia codecs as a matter of principle appear to rank quite high on his list which is just fine, knowing what his positions on the topic are. Chromatic does a good job at explaining the opposite point of view on this issue somewhere else, although I'd like to emphasize how, at least in this respect, Fedora is getting quite close to what used to be Debian's positions while being subjected to constant derisive comments from other people in the open source community about their supposed zealotry. Perhaps some credit should be given to the Devian developers now. Even more interesting I find the way other people (such as Caitlyn Martin in an article published on the O'Reilly Network) didn't seem to understand Raymond's complaints. Yes, he does complain about the overall maturity of RPM (and, by the way, yes, it truly is less mature and stable than Debian's packaging system, as absolutely anyone who has worked with both of them will be able to tell you) but, as mentioned above, his issues go well beyond that. Incidentally, I also gave up on Fedora quite some time ago, and my reasons were also, as in Raymond's case, a mixture of technical and political. It did reach the point where I had had one breakage too many during a system update. Yes, I know, that could happen with any other distribution. Yes, I know, that could happen with any other packaging system. Whatever. All I know is that since I switched to Debian (for the home server) and Ubuntu (for the workstations), I still have to experience a single issue during a system upgrade, and I have already done three. {link to this story}

[Tue Mar 13 09:05:50 CET 2007]

Dana Blankenhorn writes in ZDNet about Bill Gates' recent statements before the US Senate in favor of a highly-skilled immigration, and ends the piece with the following thought:

Is the problem then that Microsoft is just too proprietary? And if open source does eliminate trade barriers, why aren't American open source programmers making what their Sri Lankan counterparts are making?

I don't see how Microsoft being or not proprietary could be the source of the problem, although it certainly limits their chances of finding the right programmers almost by definition. After all, if their source were totally open there would be totally unknown programmers surfacing here and there all over the world who prove their skills to consumers even before the company has a clue where they live. In other words, an open source strategy can also be a godsend to companies' HR departments. However, when a company as well known as Microsoft says that a whooping 1,500 positions aren't filled because they cannot find the right people there is something wrong. In any case, I take an issue with the last statement made by Blankenhorn. The vast majority of open source programmers certainly do not come from Sri Lanka, but rather from the US and Europe. He should know that. The statistics are easily available on the Net. {link to this story}

[Thu Mar 1 11:48:54 CET 2007]

I just opened an email I received from the Ziff Davis folks with a very interesting subject line: Living With Multiple Windows Versions; Regulatory Compliance - Keeping Costs Down; Smarter Ways to Meet Storage Demands. Now, what drew my attention was the first part: "living with multiple Windows versions". Hmmm, where did I hear so many complaints about Linux being "fractioned" in many different versions before? Ah, yeah, it was Steve Ballmer trying to convince customers to stay away from Linux and telling them why they should choose Windows instead. {link to this story}