Re: Intel & Netscape invest in RedHat (fwd)

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

I thought you all might be interested in this little rant about (my 
perception of) Red Hat's lack of Quality Control...

----- Forwarded message -----

From: Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>
Message-Id: <199810010255.VAA26791@osiris.silug.org>
Subject: Re: Intel & Netscape invest in RedHat
In-Reply-To: <199810010153.VAA02438@po_box.cig.mot.com> from William F Danielson at "Sep 30, 98 08:27:18 pm"
To: danielsn@cig.mot.com
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 21:55:45 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: motlug-list@cig.mot.com

William F Danielson said:
> This is a very interesting statement you make Steve.  Where are your
> problems with Quality Control?  I am interested.  Yes, their version
> X.0 normally has some serious bugs so I normally pass on that one;
> however, I personally believe quality is all they work on.  I don't
> think they develop squat other than the initial startup defaults.
> Please expand on your thoughts.

I posted a message about this a while back (almost a year now) on the
silug-discuss list...  There's a repost of it archived at

    http://www.luci.org/luci-discuss/msg00072.html

Basically, my complaints are as follows (in no particular order):

    1) Historically, their install has been broken on all but the most
       standard hardware.  Lately I haven't had any problems with the
       x86 install, but apparently the install tends to be very broken
       on non-x86 platforms (although, in all fairness, 5.1 installed
       flawlessly on my Alpha).

    2) (Again, historically...) Silly little things tend to be broken.
       In the past, backspace didn't work properly under X, although
       the fix for that was simple and had been well-documented for
       years.  (Both of these things could easily be fixed by having
       more people actually try the install, and actually use the
       system after it has been installed.)

    3) (On a similar note) They tend not to do a whole lot of tweaking
       to make things run better.  My pet peeve has always been with
       perl...  They have never built their version of perl with a
       shared libperl.so, even though that makes the memory (and disk)
       impact of things like mod_perl much smaller.  (In their
       defense, supposedly perl linked against a shared libperl.so is
       slower than regular perl, although I've never seen a noticeable
       difference.)  (Perl is just an example...  There are others.)
       They also have not included a lot of software that I consider
       essential, at least until recently (i.e. dhcpd, squid, xntpd,
       bzip2 - all of which are in 5.1).

    4) They tend to lag behind a version (or several) on important
       programs, upgrading only when they *have* to (usually because
       of a security hole).  At the same time, they ship relatively
       (or completely) untested things like gnome, glibc, PAM, etc.
       (Think back about the things that caused headaches in older
       versions...  Those things usually fit in this category.)

(That's actually more detail than I went into in my post last year.  :)

My biggest complaint right now is their position on KDE.  While I
completely understand, and to a degree agree with, the concerns of the
license purists out there, this is the *wrong* time for Red Hat to get
all moral.  Red Hat has *always* included shareware, commercial
software, and binary-only free software.  Now they are getting all
bent out of shape over Qt's license.  For those who don't know, Qt's
license allows use in GPL'd software for X free of charge.  Others
have to pay.  It also doesn't allow distribution of modified version
without official blessing from Troll Tech, the people who make Qt,
even though source is available.  That may sound strict, but it is
completely understandable, since Qt is a commercial cross-platform
toolkit, and it's what pays the bills for the guys who work at Troll
Tech.

Red Hat included a version of Gnome in 5.1 that even the Gnome
developers didn't like.  It was *badly* broken.  If you look around on
Red Hat's Powertools CD set, you won't find any trace of KDE, even
though it has been rock-solid since at least Beta3.  (It could be
lurking somewhere in the sunsite archive...  I really haven't dug too
deep.  Even if it is buried there somewhere, I think my point is still
valid.)  Even Debian includes KDE and Qt in contrib and non-free,
respectively.

To make it all worse, people from Red Hat have been flat-out lying
about Troll Tech, saying that they would have to pay large sums of
money to distribute it and such, even though the license specifically
allows that.  This in particular *really* bugs me, since I've been
pretty good friends with Arnt Gulbrandsen, one of the programmers at
Troll Tech, for several years.  He has written a lot of free software,
including some stuff in the Linux kernel.

All of that aside, Red Hat is still my preferred distribution.  One of
these years I really hope that they do some things differently so I
don't have any more complaints.  Hopefully they'll do that before I
get around to building my own distribution.  :-)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
(217)698-1694             | Meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info

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