Submitted by The Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora Games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram, announced the release of Omega 10 Beta, a remix of Fedora this past weekend. Omega is a desktop/mobile Linux distribution that is based upon Fedora but includes packages from the Livna RPM repository. The Omega 10 Beta release is roughly equivalent to the Fedora 10 Beta to be released tomorrow, but integrates multimedia support not found in Fedora.
Omega 10 Beta is an installable live cd that includes the bleeding edge software packages from Fedora and Livna development repositories. It is roughly similar to the Fedora 10 Beta about to be released today. Fedora excludes a lot of software out of the official software repository either because it is patent-encumbered or proprietary. Since many users who install Fedora go to a third party repository like Livna for these additional programs, this live cd is a more convenient way to do just that. Because it includes all the gstreamer and xine codecs and many multimedia players including VLC and Mplayer out of the box, all the codecs including MP3 files files would just work. No proprietary applications or drivers are installed by default. They are, however, available in the repository and just a yum install away.
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Omega_Fedora_remix_packs_multimedia
Thom told me OS News wasn’t running distribution beta announcements any more, which is why I’m not submitting Mandriva’s. So…why this?
Didn’t you hear? Rahul has been appointed Linux News Deputy by the OSNews editor:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?331037
Edited 2008-09-30 04:13 UTC
Oh, that thing. I got one of those emails too. Didn’t have time to read it all.
I didn’t realize it gave you carte blanche to post whatever you like to the front page. Maybe I should look at it again. =)
It doesn’t. Editors still have to approve it.
Self promotion through deputy linux news positions suck…
This one is my bad. Our official policy is that submitters and editors shouldn’t post news on their own projects. Even if you have access to post your own stories, we ask that you submit it through “submit news” like everyone else and another editor has to post it (or delete it). I guess by some people’s reckoning I was being too permissive.
I certainly understand the rationale. If we post every tidbit of Linux-distro news, then it will be all Linux distro news all the time. But it seemed like a worthwhile distro to me, and I guess I was feeling giddy because I had just signed up our first six “deputies.”
BTW, deputies are OSNews readers who’ve volunteered to dedicate a portion of time every week and post a few stories, and they’re given access to an enhanced submission interface. The whole program is designed to widen the net and make the editors’ jobs a little easier. If you’re interested in being one, contact me. Deputies sign up for different “beats.” We could use a Mac one.
I must say, you’re a man of your word, Adam – you promised me you’d notify me of a slip-up, and you did
. I already answered your email as well.
As David explains in the above comment, this was a bit of a slip-up. This whole idea of deputies is solely his baby, and I don’t blame him for being all excited. Consider this a test to, uhm, test the whole deputy system.
Another fork.
If it’s binary compatible to Fedora 10, what is the harm? Sounds rather convenient to have Fedora + Livna in a compatible Distro. One less action to perform to get multimedia working. Just pop it in, install and run. Exactly what Linux “needs” to be “ready for the Desktop”.
But then again, some people get panick attacks when they are confronted with the choice in breakfast cereals at the supermarket… So another respin may not be your cup of tea.
Yeah, I always had trouble deciding between Quisp and Quake.
Actually, in a situation like this, where the changes are tiny and are what the users do anyway, it’s the trademark issues that are responsible for any actual confusion. Instead of being able to call it something sensible like “Fedora+Multimedia 10”, it has to be called “Omega 10”, or “Pink Beret 10”, or “Orange Sombrero 10”. Ditto for applications like “Frost-Ferret”.
Definitely Lipton on that one! 🙂
Edited 2008-09-30 14:35 UTC
There is a new set of trademark guidelines waiting on more community feedback and legal approval.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/New_trademark_guideline…
I suggested “remix” as a term for such derivatives and that has already been nominally accepted. When it gets published soon, we would be able to get better secondary branding. As the recent Firefox debates and others have shown, trademark protection while preserving the flexibility of free and open source software can be quite tricky at times. Hopefully the above guidelines represent a good balance.
Credit for the term “remix” and for leading this new wave of trademark sanity really goes to Canonical and their “Ubuntu Remix” program, of course.
Fedora has been using that term long time before the new set of guidelines are being published
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/05/31/remixing-fedora-7/
Feel free to check the dates of this publication or a few months earlier with adoption from other distros,
That’s nice. Though I would point out that use of the term “remix” within the Fedora community takes something of a backseat to the trademark policy issue, and Red Hat’s notable predilection for sending out cease and desist letters. Nice to see the trademark policy changing… for Fedora, anyway.
The working practise in the community after the emergence of the remixing tools (livecd-creator, pungi and revisor) was the emergence of official and custom spins. There has been quite a lot of them
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CustomSpins
Going from community practise to codifying the guidelines in legal terms actually means that you need to enforce it actively. Especially so if there is commercial interest in protecting the brand.
Even with a sane set of guidelines, you still need to send c&d unless you want to lose your trademark. Since you mention Canonical as a example, you would note they are doing the same thing.
http://ubuntulite.tuxfamily.org/?q=node/171
If you don’t do this, otherwise *will* abuse your trademarks soon enough.
Thanks for the Ubuntulite link. I had read that and wanted to post it for *you* to read (to demonstrate how Canonical was *already* handling these issues by recommending the Ubuntu Remix program), but couldn’t remember the distro name and decided not to bother googling for it without that. At any rate, maybe we’re “on the same page” so to speak.
These kinds of things are often muddled. Typically in Internet forums someone says that if you don’t defend your patents you lose them… and then someone “corrects” them by explaining that it’s only that way for copyrights… and then someone says that’s wrong too, and that it only applies to trademarks, proceeding to explain that if you don’t attack people who violate your trademark then you risk losing it. And at that point the matter is usually considered settled.
What I wondered for years was why a trademark holder could not be nice and simply provide free licenses to projects which want to make use of some variation of the trademark. (Maintaining a documented record of how they are managing their trademark for legal purposes.) The assumption always seemed to be that the trademark holder must force the “infringing” party to change their name to something freaky (Hi Mozilla Corp!) or crush them, legally, if they refused.
Edited 2008-09-30 16:03 UTC
Frankly? Quality control.
Red Hat is a brand name that is worth a lot of money. If people start distributing crap products called Red Hat, that is a big problem for them.
If CentOS gets screwed up somehow, that doesn’t affect the image of Red Hat. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux (My Super-Kewl Respin) starts eating people’s hard disks, you can bet RH management will be getting heart palpitations.
If you let a third-party project use your trademark, you’re relinquishing a substantial amount of control over the quality of the products associated with that trademark. Which is a big freaking no-no to anyone with a profitable product with a very solid brand attached to its name. Like, well, Red Hat.
Since Fedora doesn’t directly make ’em any money and is known to be basically a community sandbox, they can be somewhat less restrictive on the trademark issue there. But there’s a perfectly good and valid reason why a company should not allow third parties to release products using its valuable trade identities.
Or, as recent events have shown, if RedHat gets screwed up somehow, that affects the image of CentOS (which didn’t get screwed up) somewhat less.
However, having a designated term that comes to be understood as meaning “this is not the parent distro” like “Remix” resolves that issue, or is at least a pretty good compromise. Actually, the term “Remix” is particularly apt in that if a DJ somewhere produces a crappy “remix” of Cabaret Voltaire or whoever, people already understand that it’s the DJ’s awful remix, and not Cab Vol that is bad.
I don’t think you can ever get it to be ‘understood’, though. There’s always going to be pollution between the “Red Hat” and “Red Hat Remix” brands. I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to educate / inform everyone that the second should not inform on the first.
Because we don’t already have enough of those. Not only is this not an original distro, it’s yet another fork of Fedora. Is Linux really stagnating that badly?
Ye Gods, it’s the “fork trolls” yet again. Read the announcement. Most Fedora users install the OS, go to Livna, install the Livna release rpm, and then install the multimedia codecs they need. The Fedora devs have made it clear that they have no interest in helping the users do this. This remix simply eliminates the extra hassles, is 100% compatible with Fedora, and can probably be maintained by one person in about 2 hours every six months using the Revisor tool. It’s a better Fedora than Fedora. It would be perfect if this were reissued once a month or so with all the distro updates to that point.
Edited 2008-09-30 04:39 UTC
Yes, I do intend to reissue updated composes like 10.1, 10.2 and so on on a periodical basis. What I really would like is more mirrors. If anyone is interested, do let me know.
While I think that this is definitely a good thing, I’m wondering how you are handling the user education issue. While I am very much in favor of making it easy for users to get multimedia codecs, I don’t really like the Linspire/Xandros approach of just silently including proprietary apps, drivers, and codecs without providing any ethical orientation info to the user. Ubuntu does a pretty good job of making restricted codecs and drivers easily available while also making the user aware when he or she strays outside the borders of FOSS. How does Omega 10 deal with this issue?
Edited 2008-09-30 15:05 UTC
There is a difference between proprietary software and potentially patent encumbered software. The former is a philosophical issue while the latter is a legal issue (atleast for distributions based in US)
Putting them in the same bucket is not appropriate.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.h…
Omega does not install proprietary applications or drivers. What it does install are codecs and multimedia players, all of them are under free and open source software.
To make this distinction clear, rpmfusion has two different repositories – free and non-free. When Omega switches to using rpmfusion (livna will have a migration path before shutting down), the software components installed by default will be from the free repository. The non-free repository will be available but nothing from there is installed out of the box. This is for two reasons. There is a potential legal issue with bundling proprietary drivers. There is also the technical issue that installing drivers for hardware when it is not required causes breakage.
The driver manager for a while was very distribution specific. There is a effort to make it use Packagekit and convert into a proper upstream project. I am not sure of the status yet but if it works in other distributions now, Omega possibly could include that. The details have to worked out with rpmfusion.org folks. Since that is just getting started, I am still looking for feedback on the “right” solution.
So Omega 10 installs, by default, Free code which implements potentially patent encumbered codecs. Is the user (gently) informed of what that means? (BTW, I turn a less jaundiced eye to codecs implementing encumbered codecs than I do actual proprietary software. Much useful information for learning about and promoting FOSS is only available in proprietary formats.)
Is the non-free repo enabled by default? Is the user (also gently) made aware when they are pulling from the that repo, and what that means?
I realize it is a delicate balancing act getting all this right without actually preaching at the user.
There are still sane parts of the world where software parents are invalid. Omega is only going to be useful for these people currently. If you are in US, you probably just want to use to Fedora and play Fluendo or something. I am open to ideas however. It all depends on how much interest there is from users or contributors.
Livna doesn’t separate free vs non-free unlike RPMFusion. I haven’t decided on what to do when switching over to RPMFusion.
Post to rpmfusion-developers list for further discussions.
That’s complete BS, of course. But I suppose you have to say it. What due diligence are going to exercise to prevent it being abused by those, surely very few, unscrupulous people in the US who might abuse Omega 10 to get implementations of patent encumbered codecs?
I’d love to see the statistics on how many current Fedora users pay Fluendo, and have many do “or something”. [/q]
What people decide to do on their own basis is entirely upto them. Compared to the number of downloads, feedback so far has been minimal so I don’t have much of an idea on what they are upto either. For Fluendo stats, you would have to ask them assuming they collect such information from their customers.
There isn’t any “forks”. It is merely a compose of existing packages in a perhaps more convenient form. Fedora officially distributes spins like KDE and Xfce Live CD’s. This is just an added option rebranded for trademark reasons.
Btw, forks aren’t necessarily bad. Mandriva was a fork of Red Hat Linux long back and Ubuntu is a more recent “fork” of Debian and so on. Most users and distributions rely on forks like Xorg every single day.
Any prospect of a KDE-orientated Omega spin, Rahul?
I am not working on any other variants at the moment but pretty open to it if people volunteer. Post to rpmfusion-developers list if you are interested.
Rahul nice idea, I’m getting sick of setting-up multi-media shizzle for my collegues everytime there is a new fedora release out.
I do hope it’s using fedora updates?
Yes, it directly points to updates from Fedora and Livna repository. The next revision will likely replace livna with rpmfusion since livna + freshrpms+ dribble and others are merging together into a single rpmfusion repository.
The PC/OS of the Fedora world. The only thing this spin produces is a rolled up distribution with all the codecs and everything else and doesnt fix the fundamental problems. Sorry Im not impressed nor do I see this going anywhere. It takes more to produce a Linux distribution than adding a theme and extra packages.
When will the Linux community get tired of guys like Rahul Sundaram and Roberto Dohnert squatting and turning profit from their hard work.