Memo to ESR: nobody is indispensable

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 22 February 2007 07:26

Opinion and Analysis

 Raymond sent a message to a number of Linux news sites and mailing lists yesterday (US time), saying that, after 13 years, he had given up on Red Hat and its Fedora (community) GNU/Linux distributions.

This happened "when an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which
an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable."

Raymond attributed this failure to "incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and the fact that rpm is not statically linked - so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed."

But he also claimed that there were deeper problems in the Fedora community. Some of them, he claimed, were:
Chronic governance problems within the Fedora project.
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.

Senior kernel developer Alan Cox took him up on the last point, responding with: "That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term "open source" also did the decent thing and died out with you."