[wplug] re; RedHat comments

Sean Parsons sean.parsons at verizon.net
Wed Feb 5 08:42:49 EST 2003


Ed,

I have had a growing dissatisfaction with redhat, especially 8.0. A lot
of their instability comes from running a "closed" open source shop. By
that I mean they work on programs in house and don't give their source
back to the various community projects till they are done. A good
example of this is XFree86. The version they were using was still in
beta when they were testing it for psyche. instead of working with the
fellows over at XFree86.org they made their own patches, and by the time
RH finally released their changes XFree86 had already solved RH's issues
in a different way. So instead of having all of the open source
community available to work out any bugs in X for RH, they only had
their own beta testers. 

Their changes to KDE created a complete abortion to what is ordinarily
an exceptional GUI. Many people like Shawn Gordon (CEO of the Kompany)
and Mosfet (creator of KDE's kicker, mosfet's liquid, Pixie Plus, ect.)
have very publicly complained about how much harder it is to make a KDE
app for RH 8.0. (Here are lniks to statements from each Shawn Gordon --
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/01/15/1042520666517.html and
Mosfet -- http://mosfet.org/noredhat.html ) 

That is just my 2 cents.




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