PegaSoft Canada - The Lone Coder - The Failure of Fedora

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The Lone Coder
Reflections for the Unsung Linux Saviours
by Ken O. Burtch

The Failure of Fedora

Fedora is Red Hat Linux's master project. A way to get more developers involved in the core design of the most popular Linux distribution, these folks release a free version of their software so developers can get a crack at laying the base for the next release of Red Hat Linux, now known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Up to and including Red Hat 9, a free version of their distribution was available. So what's the big difference with Fedora and the old free Red Hat Linux we used to know and love? Bugs. Stupid Bugs. Bugs anybody could have got rid of. But they didn't.

Distribution suppliers provide two services. First, they package up applications so you don't have to build them from the sources yourself. But their other function is to test the mix and make sure that the combination holds together.

With Fedora, Red Hat is providing service one without service two. Like an unpaved road marked with "Use at Your Own Risk", people who download Fedora better be prepared to squash the bugs themselves.

I delibrately skipped Fedora Core 1 and waited for Fedora Core 2. Imagine my unexpected surprise when the volume was off on boot. Why wasn't so obvious a bug fixed? Because there's no testing on Fedora. Then I hit a mysterious X windows error message caused by a single out of date line in the X config file. The software installer didn't work properly with automount. The power management doesn't work. GCC contained glaring bugs. And so on.

Open source may be released as "buyer beware" software, but their is an unspoken code that you don't release products that haven't gone through some basic alpha tests. The bugs I encountered weren't flukey bugs. They were bugs left in by people who couldn't be bothered to fix them.

As an open source developer, I can't test my products on a distribution so flakey that I have to turn up the volume every time I boot. Instead of embracing open source developers, Red Hat has alienated them with Fedora. As long as other distributions administer quality control on their free distributions, Red Hat better watch out for a mass defection of the people they wanted to embrace.

July 12, 2004

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