Red Hat is losing the plot

In an open message distributed to several high-profile Linux mailing lists and news organisations, Raymond said he is switching to Ubuntu after 13 years because he has had enough of Red Hat.

According to ITOpenWorld.com, most of Raymond's problems are with Fedora which is the free version of Red Hat and a testing ground for technologies that will eventually go into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

He says that over the last five years, he had watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige.

Raymond says that the blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels. Fedora was becoming irrelevant because it had failed to get onto the desktop and include proprietary media formats, he said.

The way repositories were maintained, the submission process and "stagnant" development of Red Hat's packaging technology was also fairly shocking.

Apparently the project's core group has become steadily 'more unhealthy', introverted and religiously looking for a narrow 'free software' ideological purity.

Ubuntu has risen to the challenges as Fedora fell away from them, he said, it says here. µ