Eric.S.Raymond forsakes Fedora Linux and embraces Ubuntu

Eric.S.Raymond is best known for authoring the famous essay "The cathedral and the bazaar" where he discusses the theories of software engineering in terms of two fundamentally different development styles - the cathedral model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. This essay has become so popular that it has also been published in a book format (By O'Reilly). One of the most often used quotes from his essay is - "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". He is also a board member of Freespire.

In the past, Mr Raymond has been in the limelight for the push to allow proprietary codecs into Linux. His surmise is that the Linux community need to start integrating more proprietary software in order to get market share. ESR points to proprietary multimedia codecs as an example, where Linux distributions should step away from Free software ideology in order to get more users. He states that this will succeed in bringing those users back to open source later on which will lead to gaining more influence with manufacturers and media distributors thus helping make Linux a properly supported platform. And this idea he put forward was met with ridicule from a major section of the community.

Now again he has succeeded in grabbing the headlines by stating his intention to switch to Ubuntu from Fedora which he has been using till now. And he supports his move by listing the following reasons - and I quote :

• Chronic governance problems.
• Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
• A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
• Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.
• Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
• Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.
  

While I agree with him on his statement on the performance of Yum - I have myself found it quite slow - a reason attributed to it storing all the details in an XML file and then reading from it, I do not agree that Red Hat/ Fedora is in the wrong to flatly deny to incorporate proprietary multimedia formats in their distribution.

Alan Cox has given a reply to ESR's letter in the Fedora mailing list.

Ironically, another news that is being just aired is that Microsoft has been asked to pay 1.52 Billion dollars in a patent case against Alcatel-Lucent concerning the use of MP3 technology in WMP [Source: BBC].

So the risk factors concerning incorporating proprietary / patented formats in GNU/Linux is clear for all to see. Can Red Hat / Ubuntu or any other distribution survive if they are asked to pay such a huge sum for alleged patent infringement ? I doubt it.

On another note, considering that he is a board member at Freespire, and given his stand, shouldn't he be embracing Freespire instead of Ubuntu ?