Tag: Red Hat

Happy 10th birthday, Fedora!

Dear Fedora,

I know we have our disagreements.  At times I don’t know where you are going.  Or whether even you know where you are going.  But that’s OK.  Because you are still awesome.  You still pay my bills.  You are still fun to use.  And you are still on every single computer I can get my hands on, both at home and at work.

It’s your 10th birthday.  And you’ve grown up a lot.  It seems like only yesterday I was upgrading my Red Hat 9 machines to an awkwardly named Fedora Core 1 Yarrow Linux, and yet here we are – expecting the 20th release.  You’ve kept your word on releasing every 6 month (albeit with a few weeks delay every single time).  You’ve grown.  You’ve changed.  You’ve matured.

While I had a few hiccups with you over the years – those Gnome and KDE fights, those boot loader changes, and still painful inclusion of SELinux, you’ve always been there for me.  I’ve helped me to build numerous projects.  To make new friends.  To understand the world better.

Please continue to be what you are.  Please continue to change.  Please continue to improve.  Just, if you can, think of me, your biggest fan and seasoned user, once in a while.

Happy 10th birthday and a huge thank you.

Yours truly, Leonid.

Red Hat contributions to Gnome

Via this rant, I learned about this report, which shows who contributes the most to the Gnome project.  I knew that Red Hat was doing a lot of Gnome, but I never knew how much it actually was.

Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.

Way to go, Red Hat!

One of the things to love about Red Hat

Karsten Wade shares five reasons for which he loves working at Red Hat.  Not a reason on its own, but a part of one is this excellent quote:

At this company, the technical people have a serious influence on adjusting the mindset of the very smart people we bring in who haven’t yet fully absorbed the open source way.

Just brilliant!

Open Source Contributors

With the recent news of Sun Microsystems buying MySQL AB for one billion dollars (insert Dr.Evil’s evil laugh here), I hear plenty calling Sun the largest contributor to open source. I beg to differ.

Sun is doing a lot for open source, there is no argument about it, and whatever they do is much appreciated. But calling them the largest contributor to open source, is a little bit too far fetched, I think. First of all, let’s see what we are talking about. Here is the list of open source stuff from Sun (according to their open source initiative page):

  • Solaris Enterprise System / OpenSolaris
  • Linux from Sun
  • StarOffice / OpenOffice.org
  • NetBeans
  • OpenSPARC
  • Java

That’s something, but doesn’t qualify for the number one contributor. First of all, these are mostly Sun’s own offerings. Secondly, some of these (Java and OpenSolaris) have been opened to be saved. They were open when it was pretty much obvious to everyone that if they are not, they aren’t going to last very long. Or, at least, they won’t prosper as they should. Thirdly, the effort that was put in some of these (StarOffice / OpenOffice.org) by Sun isn’t all that impressive. I mean, yeah, they bought and opened StarOffice. People jumped on it and started to improve it. And it improved a lot. But it’s still huge, bloated, and clunky, after all these years…

As I said, it’s still appreciated. There is plenty of good in Sun’s open source initiative. But I think there are companies that have done more good to open source than Sun did. I think that IBM did a great deal more. And it did it before anyone else, when open source needed help the most. Then, I think Google has done plenty and is still doing a lot. And, I think it’s not fair at all to forget Red Hat. These guys made a lot of money on open source software, but they were more than willing to share and invest those money back into the community.

What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?

Slashdot runs an excellent discussion on the topic of “What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?“.  If you want to learn more about what people on the Web had changed their minds in 2007, try this Google search – plenty more there.

What did I change my mind about in 2007?  Short answer: Google.  Continue reading for the long version.

Continue reading What Did You Change Your Mind About in 2007?