Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

William Cattey wdc at MIT.EDU
Mon Dec 24 23:51:53 UTC 2007


It turns out that 1000 seats at MIT are switching to Ubuntu from  
Enterprise.
They will not be using LTS, because they expect to need more recent  
hardware drivers.

They are switching to Ubuntu instead of Fedora even though they  
expect there will be an annual OS update of Ubuntu required, the apt  
package management system makes a lot of the work to switch from our  
present tightly integrated OS + alternate versions of packages +  
additional packages to alternate versions and additional packages  
layered on a pre-installed system.

It is product focus, however that makes Ubuntu attractive to me and  
many at MIT.  With Fedora and Enterprise, the two choices are three   
year old functionality, or bleeding edge functionality.  Example: in  
November Fedora 8 came out with important laptop power management  
functionality, but it also shipped with a broken rewrite of  
NetworkManager, and an alpha version of BIND.  Fedora 6 shifted to  
not getting any attention, and the clock to get off Fedora 7 started  
EVEN BEFORE FEDORA 8 FUNCTIONALITY WAS STABLE!

With Ubuntu, a single common code base is taken care of by different  
groups serving different clientele.  Canonical Inc. will take money  
from corporate customers who need help managing systems or getting  
new functionality.  Volunteers explore new functionality and move  
forward on the process of producing open source solutions.  At  
particular points a particular version is flagged for longer term  
support, but the primary focus is not on exploring new functionality,  
or on back porting popular functionality to an ancient codebase  
tailored to customers afraid of change. It is simply:  Produce a  
usable experience with a balance of stable code and new  
functionality.  What Fedora-based spin has this focus?

-Bill

----

William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology

N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc at mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/


On Dec 24, 2007, at 5:38 PM, Jon Stanley wrote:

> On Dec 24, 2007 4:19 PM, Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip at kanarip.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> I don't think Ubuntu LTS gives you the latest and greatest unless you
>> upgrade, does it?
>
> I think that's the whole point.
>
>> Same with CentOS; although it might be supported longer then you are
>> going to use it, whenever you feel you want newer software you  
>> upgrade
>> to the next release. Meanwhile, it's stable.
>
> Correct - however security updates are backported to the "old"
> versions of the software.
>
>> The Fedora Project moves in with EPEL, Extra Packages for Enterprise
>> Linux, perfectly suitable for a CentOS machine and with the same  
>> release
>> and 'support' cycle.
>
> Not entirely sure what you mean here.  I think what was being called
> for was a release whereby it's "supported" (with security updates,
> etc) beyond the current 1 year, however perhaps not as much as the 7
> years that RHEL is supported.
>
> However, as Matthew said in the e-mail that came in as I was writing
> this, there was little interest in Fedora Legacy when it existed.
> What makes us think that there's more of a demand now?  It's either
> the short, bleeding edge release cycle of Fedora as we know it, or the
> long release cycle of RHEL.  Both serve different purposes.
>
> -Jon
>
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