Seneca breaks silence on Fedora Remix

Chris Tyler posted an update today.

Estimated release date is 20th, but lots of work to do.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-July/003631.html

New estimated release date for Fedora Remix from Chris Tyler:

"aim to ship next week", with 3.2.27 kernel.

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting-1/2012-09-26/fedora-meeting-1.2012-09-26-20.00.log.html

Also, the RPF is reportedly working with Fedora on firmware licensing:

>> I heard that there won't be an official Fedora build of the Raspberry Pi remix because

>> the firmware license is not compatible with the Fedora firmware guidelines.

>

> Correct at this point in time. I meant an official remix stable release.

> Fedora legal and the board are working with the foundation to try and resolve the firmware issue

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/arm/2012-September/004085.html

Seneca blew it at Pi launch and instead of communicating with end users they just bailed. Then at the end of August the new release candidates quietly appeared from nowhere, but still communication (and support) remains woeful. Are we to expect a sudden (and miraculous) transformation in their customer service skills, or will those who "invest" in Fedora find themselves high and dry at some point in the future?

One of the reasons that FOSS growth remains less than stellar is that too many people are willing to keep garbage on life support rather than hit it on the head with a shovel and quietly bury it. A small extinction event would create space for smart folks who are willing to learn from the mistakes of the past and are able to create applications in line with the current environment.

I can't believe that FOSS advocates are Creationist in their beliefs!

Sorry, I went a bit ranty there for a moment! Still, good ideas that are poorly implemented are just as much of a waste of time as beautifully marketed bad ideas. The end result is what matters...

> Seneca blew it at Pi launch and instead of communicating with end users they just bailed.

My impression of what happened is that Seneca and the RPF were in a "partnership" that

neither really wanted to be in, and neither was willing to make the necessary investments

to make the project a success. 

RPF clearly wanted Ubuntu as the preferred OS, but that didn't work out.  They turned to

Fedora instead, but as far as I can tell, made absolutely no investment other than a single

alpha board.   I haven't heard the RPF citing any advantages of Fedora over Debian,

other than noting that the Fedora folks had put a lot of effort into it.  When the first release

had problems, they dropped it like a hot potato.

Similarly, Fedora considers ARM a secondary architecture, and considers the RPi Remix to be

a second-class member of the ARM family.  They realize that the RPi would require a lot of work

to do X11 acceleration, and to do a hard-float version, and to integrate the RPi kernel changes

into the current kernel, especially with device tree support and the troublesome USB driver. 

They realize that the RPi isn't suitable for self-hosted compilation in their build farm, due to lack

of ram and lack of SATA.  They are focused mostly on ARMv7 and later architectures, and don't

want to be supporting ARMv6 if and when ARM gets promoted to a primary architecture.

They also aren't set up to support hundreds of thousands of RPi users.

Thanks for the reply coder27 - so, the plot thickens...

I think that Eben mentioned in an interview that they originally had an eye on Ubuntu, but Canonical dropped support for v6 a very long ime ago (after 9.04?), so I can't really see it as a credible reason for rolling out a piece of hardware with a broken O.S. nearly three years later. Also, why did they throw their weight behind Fedora, rather than say, Arch, or Debian, I wonder? I suspect your impression regarding an unwillingness to make investments is right on the money. Perhaps Seneca put in a very cheap bid without realising what they were taking on. So why persist? As you suggest Fedora aren't set up for consumer-level support - I feel I need a degree in "Geek" to extract any information from their utterly confusing sprawl of an internet presence! This is more of a reflection on my lack of hacker-fu than a criticism of their set up (which has probably served Fedora enthusiasts reasonably well over the years), but crikey, it's hard work in there for a mere human...

I suspect that with the benefit of hindsight there wouldn't be a lot of Linux development houses willing to build a boutique O.S. for a superceded architecture without first taking a fat cheque and an assurance that the Foundation would keep their end of the bargain regarding firmware / driver development and any other reasonable support. It doesn't explain the Fedora debacle though (or the impression that no-one at Fedora Towers is willing to concede that this is a debacle).

Perhaps Fedora are still under contract. Or perhaps they are battling on out of pride. *shrug*

> So why persist?

Good question.

I believe Seneca's funding comes mostly from government and other grants,

and it probably looks good on such grant applications to say you're working on

a popular educational device.

Their primary motivation doesn't seem to be to capture market share on the RPi,

or to regain "recommended OS" status.  They seem to be weighing the concern

of appearing to be taking too long to generate a release against the concern

of issuing a release that will not be well received, like the Fedora 14 release.

or will those who "invest" in Fedora find themselves high and dry at some point in the future?

Not sure how much you know about Fedora, essentially it's the alpha-test space for things that may (or may not) end up in the commercial RHEL some years in the future. As such, it's quite easy to find yourself high and dry quite quickly with Fedora since they really don't do any sort of support beyond the horizon of the next release.

OTOH, Seneca is not equal to Fedora. I'm not really sure what the exact relationship is there, or between them and the RPF, but unless Seneca are prepared to put the continued effort into their port I don't see how it can be viable. The official fedora folks have indicated they're not really interested.

or will those who "invest" in Fedora find themselves high and dry at some point in the future?

Not sure how much you know about Fedora, essentially it's the alpha-test space for things that may (or may not) end up in the commercial RHEL some years in the future. As such, it's quite easy to find yourself high and dry quite quickly with Fedora since they really don't do any sort of support beyond the horizon of the next release.

OTOH, Seneca is not equal to Fedora. I'm not really sure what the exact relationship is there, or between them and the RPF, but unless Seneca are prepared to put the continued effort into their port I don't see how it can be viable. The official fedora folks have indicated they're not really interested.

Yeah I use Fedora all the while, you are effectively on a rolling beta program, it's really for developers or those who want to try new technologies and are willing to "work things out" if required.  Fedora it's self is going stong, Senica it's self seems to be a bit of an ebarrassment it's sad to say. I don't see it all been very effective in the long term with out dramatic upturn in effort. Other distros are moving a head rapidly.