Red Hat: Where recessions are good news

Red Hat is also the company that's bringing us Gnome3, which is a pile of dog cr@p.

Actually, it's not, Grishnakh. GNOME 3 comes from the GNOME Foundation.

Fedora (Red Hat) recognize that the Gnome and Unity cellphone interfaces are not in sync with their business and server models. That is why the Fedora install media (3+GB) have XfCE and LxDE options, and a couple of others, in addition to Gnome and KDE. The desktop developers do not equal the distribution compilers. I use the Fedora KDE desktop on my desktops at work and at home. It works for me and gives me several desktop formats. That should be the criteria for any user using any interface. Too bad some of the UI developers don't see it that way.

@BFM, Red Hat is not a server only business model and makes a good chunk of money on desktops as well albeit not consumer desktops. Red Hat also funds a good amount of general desktop and GNOME development

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions#Free_De...

Having said that, Fedora Project decides what goes into the DVD and has no connection whatsoever to Red Hat business models. If you follow Fedora development mailing lists, these decisions are made transparently.

Fedora with Xfce is great. Fedora LTS with Xfce would be even better.

Icafiero: Not really. Many of the prominent Gnome developers, including Jon McCann who was recently interviewed on an article here somewhere, are employees of Red Hat. Red Hat is paying them to work full-time on Gnome, so to me, that equals "bringing us Gnome3". If RH didn't employ these people as Gnome developers, then Gnome wouldn't get nearly as many development resources. To borrow a term from alcoholism, Red Hat is an "enabler".

Now, as rahul noted, Fedora is somewhat separate from Red Hat, and isn't responsible for paying McCann's salary. That's entirely Red Hat's doing, so don't confuse Fedora's actions with Red Hat's.

Many, Grishnakh? Got a number, because as far as I know, there are possibly a few, maybe several at the most, who are paid employees of Red Hat -- and several would be stretching it.

There are many Red Hat employees working on various FOSS projects, so to say that "Red Hat employees working on GNOME 3 means that Red Hat is responsible for it" is both a.) factually incorrect and b.) discounts the work that thousands of other developers outside of Red Hat do on the project, for better or worse.

Using your logic, you'd have to say that Red Hat brings you many of the rest of the FOSS programs that Red Hat employees contribute to. Clearly that's debatable and, in my opinion, factually incorrect.

@lcafiero, Red Hat has several depending on what you consider several. I don't know the numbers offhand but I would say atleast 50 developers working full time on various desktop components including but not limited to GNOME, Xorg etc and is the largest commercial distribution vendor to contribute to these components but @Grishnakh is still wrong in asserting that Red Hat brings GNOME 3. The highest contributor to GNOME 3 is still volunteers and there are several other vendors involved as noted in the GNOME census.

http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/03/17/the-gnome-census-pro...

GNOME truly is a diverse community and has several safe guards against one vendor dominating it including a copyright assignment policy and limits on the number of people from a single vendor on the GNOME Foundation Board. Anyone who has taken a look at GNOME Project seriously would immediately understand this. It is amusing to see Red Hat viewed as not contributing to desktop and also viewed as being solely responsible for GNOME in the same thread.

Thanks for that clarification, rahulsundaram (great to hear from you again, by the way).

Steven -- Great minds think alike: I'm using Fedora 15 Xfce as well.