Open-source guru knocks Fedora

Eric Raymond, influential developer and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has delivered a public rebuke to Red Hat's Fedora project.

In a message distributed to several high-profile Linux mailing lists and news organizations, Raymond said he is switching to the Ubuntu distribution after 13 years as a loyal Red Hat user, citing numerous technical and governance problems around Fedora.

Fedora is Red Hat's freely distributed Linux distribution, and is closely linked to the company's commercial versions, serving as a testing ground for technologies that will eventually go into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is also intended to form a link between Red Hat and the developer community, but has attracted criticism from developers from 2003, when it replaced the consumer-oriented Red Hat Linux.

Raymond's open letter refers to previous criticisms, but is the most damning assessment of the project yet to come from such a high-profile figure.

"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," he wrote. "The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels."

He cited technical issues such as the way repositories are maintained, the submission process and "stagnant" development of Red Hat's packaging technology, RPM, as well as governance problems, the failure to effectively reach for desktop market share and the failure to include proprietary media formats, as well as a more general sense that Fedora is becoming irrelevant.

"The culture of the project's core group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more insistent on narrow 'free software' ideological purity, and more disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a majority of computer users," he wrote. "I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them."

Fedora is intended to include only free or open-source components, and doesn't include, for instance, the codecs that would allow users to watch Windows Media formats, although users can install them. Raymond said a recent deal between Ubuntu's commercial sponsor, Canonical, and Linspire, which will give Ubuntu access to commercial codecs, shows Canonical and Ubuntu are more forward-thinking.

"Canonical's recent deal with Linspire... is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in," he wrote. "Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future."

He argued Fedora has suffered from its dual identity as a user- and developer-oriented distribution and a testbed for Red Hat's commercial products.

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