Red Hat cancels Fedora Foundation

BOSTON--Red Hat has dismantled the Fedora Foundation, an initiative conceived as an entity to provide intellectual-property protections to the open-source realm but whose mission grew impractically broad.

Fedora Core is Red Hat's free hobbyist version of Linux, designed to mature technologies quickly for use in the premium Red Hat Enterprise Linux product and to sate developers' appetite for new features.

When Red Hat announced the foundation in June 2005, the company said it had "the intent of moving Fedora project development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation. Red Hat will still provide substantial financial and engineering support, but this move will assure broader community involvement in Fedora-sponsored projects."

A Red Hat explanation of the foundation's cancellation, posted to a Fedora mailing list on Tuesday, describes a narrower initial mission: "To act as a repository for patents that would protect the interests of the open-source community."

But the foundation suffered from mission creep, which refers to the process by which a mission's approaches and goals change over time. "Every Fedora issue became a nail for the foundation hammer, and the scope of the foundation quickly became too large for efficient progress," Red Hat's Max Spevack said in the posting.

From an intellectual-property point of view, Red Hat's efforts now are focused on its work with the Open Invention Network, a multi-company effort to amass patents that may be freely used with open-source software, Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens said in an interview here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

"We believe what we had envisioned it to be didn't make a lot of sense," Stevens said. "We began working on the Open Invention Network some time after (the foundation launch). We put a ton of energy into that."

And for governing Fedora Core, the company will rely on the Fedora Project Board instead of the foundation. The board includes five Red Hat employees and four outsiders.

The move was announced on the eve of FUDCon, a Fedora conference that begins Thursday, the last day of the LinuxWorld show.

[Jim Hubbard]

When will the pengiun wake up?

FREE SOFTWARE AND OPEN SOURCE IS NOT A VIABLE BUSINESS MODEL!

Open source is barely limping along and is not even close to being a viable desktop alternative.

Would somebody shoot this wounded thing already?

[georgescott]

Open source can make money $$$

Look at Mozilla. It started and was a drain of cash, then it was dumped, but with one change of the start page it now makes enough money for it to continue.

Open source projects as long as they can derive some revenue that is enough. It takes some money so a few key people can work on the project all of the time in organizing others and a few in development.

[Dachi]

Fedora Foundation vs Fedora Project

So Fedora Project is responsible for the release of "Fedora Core" (the distro), but Fedora Foundation is only for "intellectual property protections" and such?

I've got a half eaten bag or doritos that says most people see the headline and read "Red Hat cancels Fedora Linux"

[poster48150]

Any Isaac Asimov fans here?

Maybe there's actually a secret "Second Foundation" that will take on the (Microsoft) Empire...

[dragonbite]

I did think that

At first I thought Fedora Linux was getting cancled, glad it's not. Unfortunately Red Hat's handling of Fedora was questionable in the beginning and I hope this doesn't fan the flames any.

As for that whole argument about FOSS companies not making money, Red Hat is one that's doing pretty darn good, and there's also the MySQL and Qt (Trolltech) that works.

Saying that Linux won't make it because it's source code is free is very narrow minded.

Does Microsoft make all of it's money from having vendors sell Windows on every box (let's forget whether they have a choice at this moment)?

No.

They make a lot of money from the products they have competition in (and have to actually perform); Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Xbox, etc.

With Linux, it isn't the OS that's the money-maker, but it facilitates competition or capabilities that may otherwise be prohibitive.

Sell Hardware and not have to develop the OS but have access to a whole community of support and devopers (IBM)

Provide a version for free and another for money which can include proprietary stuff, be more "open", or just doesn't fall under the GPL (MySQL, Trolltech, makers of Qt)

You could offer a service that somebody sees as being valuable, like full support or customization (Red Hat, Novell)

You can use Linux to run solid, secure, safe servers to have users utilize (too many web hosting companies to list)

So whether it's for technical merit (customizability, quality, etc.) or financial (sell product, spend little on an OS), Linux is a tool for businesses to make money.

Microsoft has access to Windows' source code so internally it's not unlike the Linux models. The other products are able to take advantage of technical ability to dig into Windows' source code without having to pay for it.

The business model with Linux is maturing, and I am sure more people will find ways to make money from it.

[My-Self]

Read it from the (open) source

http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/583