Red Hats Off to White Box

In last month's column, I discussed the problems with the Fedora project. In trying to get more developers involved in the Red Hat core, Red Hat sacrificed testing. As a result, Fedora is too buggy to be used for many open source developers. Red Hat alienated the people they were trying to serve.

Once again the flexible, evolutionary nature of open source comes to the rescue. While some lament that open source has no official beaucracy to impose standards, that lack of a blundering committee allows for fast, innovative solutions.

In the case of Fedora, that solution came from the White Box project (http://whiteboxlinux.org). If Red Hat Enterprise uses open source software, what's stopping someone from purchasing Red Hat Enterprise and releasing a meta distribution by rebuilding all the sources. Absolutely nothing.

According to the White Box web site, their goal is "To provide an unencumbered RPM based Linux distribution that retains enough compatibility with Red Hat Linux to allow easy upgrades and to retain compatibility with their Errata srpms. Being based off of RHEL3 means that a machine should be able to avoid the upgrade treadmill until Oct 2008 since RHEL promises Errata availability for five years from date of initial release and RHEL3 shipped in Oct 2003...Or more briefly, to fill the gap between Fedora and RHEL."

White Box provides a clone of Red Hat Enterprise that actually works. Fedora may be cutting edge, but White Box is a tested, debugged version of Red Hat Enterprise. And it's free for download. In this respect, White Box is the true successor to formerly free versions of Red Hat.

If you're looking to test your latest open source projects for Red Hat compatibility, you may want to skip Fedora and go with White Box.

August 30, 2004