In the news: Eric S. Raymond shifts to Ubuntu

[Nathan Eckenrode]

Eric Dunbar wrote:

> On 21/02/07, Christian Pfeiffer Jensen <cj2003 at debian-news.net> wrote:
>>
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg01006.html
>>
>> [quote]
>> This afternoon, I installed Edgy Eft on my main development machine --
>> from one CD, not five.  In less than three hours' work I was able to
>> recreate the key features of my day-to-day toolkit.  The
>> after-installation mass upgrade to current packages, always a
>> frightening prospect under Fedora, went off without a hitch.
>>
>> I'm not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will
>> be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn
>> a new set of administration tools.
>>  [/quote]
> 
> [quote2]
> 
> If I thought the state of Fedora were actually improving, I might hang
> in there.  But it isn't.  I've been on the fedora-devel list for
> years, and the trend is clear.  The culture of the project's core
> group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more
> insistent on narrow "free software" ideological purity, and more
> disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must
> be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a
> majority of computer users.
> 
> I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away
> from them.  Canonical's recent deal with Linspire, which will give
> Linux users legal access to WMF and other key proprietary codecs, is
> precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken
> the lead in.  Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I
> now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.
> 
> [/quote2]
I seem to recall that ESR has advocated actually this sort of thing in the
recent past. So it does not thoroughly shock me that he is making this
jump.