FOSDEM 2009 report
Par bochecha le lundi, février 9 2009, 20:00 - Lien permanent
On Sunday, I was at FOSDEM 2009 in Bruxelles.
I couldn't go on Saturday, and as a result, I missed the two talks that were interesting me the much: the ones from Greg and Tomeu about Sugar and Fedora. I hope the presentations will be uploaded on the fp.o page (or somewhere else), so that I can catch up.
I spent most of the time at the booth, which allowed me to meet a lot of Fedora Ambassadors I didn't know. Loved it. Talking with people from different local communities was great, and as we discussed with Yaakov, we (the French community) really need to work in a less insular way and share experiences with others.
Regarding the booth attendance, I was once again incredibly surprised to see how people are attracted by this little green and white alien on the tables. We had 4 XOs, all of them had almost always someone toying with it. The funny thing is it looked like Fedora can be summed up to the XO, as very few people were asking about Fedora specifically, while a lot were interested in the OLPC project.
I had two requests for liveUSB creations, but I failed on the second one. It was one of those keys with a fancy partition (seen as /dev/sr1 on my Fedora 10 laptop) with programs autoruned when you plug the key on Windows (something called "U3 System"). I tried three times to create the liveUSB (both with Live USB Creator and livecd-iso-to-disk), each time, the liveUSB was successfully created but couldn't boot. Could it be this "U3" stuff that prevents booting on such USB sticks ?
Second failure of the day, someone came with an Acer Aspire One, running a custom Fedora 8 (they call it Linpus). He wanted to be able to listen to MP3 files with Amarok, but as Fedora 8 was EOLed some time ago, I couldn't find the necessary packages. Big Fail to Acer: how can you honestly sell computers with an already EOLed system ?
I could only assist to one talk: Cobbler and Koan. The talk was great, and those two look really interesting. I'm looking forward to use them at work.
So this was a great day, filled with encounters with great people, but also exhausting. I have only two regrets: not being able to go on Saturday, and not having gone there in previous years :-D. Thanks to all those who made this event a success for Fedora, and an(two) enjoyable day(s) for its community.
Commentaires
The Acer Aspire One incident and situations like it are the reason why Canonical's mixture of LTS and non-LTS releases into the Ubuntu release stream is a more compelling target from an OEM-Canonical business partnership point of view.
People who like Fedora has been struggling with that sort of issue for a long time. I remember when people were showing off the pepper pad at a Fudcon running Fedora prior to the netbook explosion and the same fundamental problem was expressed there. Fedora is a poor target for OEM pre-installs because the timescales required for OEMs to get product out into the retail chain simply do not match up with Fedora's release timescales.
It's a reality. We can't wish it away. This isn't going to change until a business entity makes an investment to extend support services in a way that makes Fedora attractive for OEM pre-install consideration. It's doubtful Red Hat will be the business entity. Can another business come along and base their business on top of Fedora? It's a very interesting question. I think they can. I'd like to see OEM's make a direct investment in Fedora support services aimed at their own needs...instead of forking off things like Linpus.
I have contacted Acer back in October and informed them about Fedora 8 being EOL soon. They told me they were not exactly sure what to do but they would take care of the problem in time. Obviously the did not.
Let's face it: Linpus does not have the manpower to backport all the necessary security updates, not to mention bugfixes. On the other hand you can't expect users to do a complete system upgrade every year.
Also I'm in contact with the European product manager of Acer in order to get access to the source code of the Aspire one. The do have a source rpm repository, but unfortunately some packages are missing, others are containing precompiled binaries. This is a GPL violation. but seems as nether Acer nor Linpus really care
Why don't they understand that they would benefit from
opening their code? Patches could be included upstream which mean less work for
them and easier updates for the users.
Yes, Fedora definitely is not a suitable OS for OEMs.
Unfortunately, it seems like everybody knows that, except those OEM vendors...
Christoph, about the GPL violation, did you report it to http://gpl-violations.org ?