“Whether it is Fedora, Ubuntu or SUSE on your desktop, it is okay as long as you are using a Linux environment”
Fedora lost its throne to Ubuntu some years back but the team at Red Hat, a major sponsor of Fedora, is unaffected by it. It is confident of Fedora’s unique capabilities and believes that if open source flourishes, Fedora will also grow automatically. Diksha P Gupta from Open Source For You spoke to Harish Pillay, Global Head, Community Architecture and Leadership, Red Hat, about how Fedora’s position remains secure in the desktop market and about Red Hat’s role in the project.
Q What role do you play in Fedora and Red Hat? I head a group called the Community Architecture and Leadership team and am based in Singapore. What we do is to effectively work with the global open source communities outside Red Hat, and Fedora is one of those communities. We are responsible for bridging ‘internal Red Hat’ with the external community. We do not dictate anything from a community point of view. We just make sure that the corporate world does the right thing as far as the community is concerned. We keep looking out for opportunities for Red Hat in the open source community that we can participate in. Whenever an open source community, including Fedora, requires our support or needs to engage with Red Hat, we facilitate that as well. QWhat
was your group’s contribution in Fedora 20, and what are the new offerings in this open source distro? Fedora is run as a community project. The Fedora Project Leader is, essentially, the go-to person for anything to do with the distro. She is a full time employee of Red Hat, but her focus is more on Fedora related issues, so she is called the Fedora Project Leader. She takes care of the new ideas, new directions, handles issues, if any, et al. That is her role, and it is largely driven by what the community needs and not what Red Hat requires as a business. So Fedora is very community focused and community driven. Red Hat’s investment is to have individuals being paid a salary to work on Fedora projects. Red Hat also provides the infrastructure, servers, bandwidth, hosting and support for the Fedora project.
Fedora 20 is an interesting offering. Fedora is an evolving project, so there are many new components that have become a lot more mature in this release. An example is SystemD, which is a way to start and stop services and processes within an operating system. This is evolutionary if you look at how this was done earlier in the UNIX world. We have actually moved away from that model of starting and stopping services, to what we are calling the SystemD approach. It has reached a level that is a lot more mature today. What this basically means to end users is that their systems will be starting up and shutting down much quicker than earlier. And when users want to use email services, control a firewall, or run other such services that involve managing and maintaining a system, SystemD gives a lot more functionality for it to be done in a more granular fashion compared to what was available before. The previous methods were based on technologies and ideas that came from the 1980s and 1990s in the UNIX space.
While in many ways it is evolutionary, yet at the same time, it is revolutionary in the way systems are being managed moving forward in the Fedora space. What happens as a result of this is that these technologies find their way into the enterprise side of the house, which
“Fedora 20 is an interesting offering. Fedora is an evolving project, so there are many new components that have become a lot more mature in this release. An example is SystemD, which is a way to start and stop services and processes within an operating system. This is evolutionary if you look at how this was done earlier in the UNIX world.”
is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So lessons learnt in how we go about using SystemD, the best practices, what we need to be aware of because of the changing way in how you manage our systems, the disadvantages and how we address them, et al, all find space in RHEL when it adopts SystemD as a default, across the board. You will see these features coming out in RHEL 7.
In addition, we had improvements and updates to the graphical interface GNOME 3.10. We also have KDE updates to it. So there are more incremental changes that have been made to the latest Fedora. Q Fedora earlier occupied the top spot with respect to usage. That position has now been taken over by Ubuntu. How do you view this situation? As far as Red Hat and the open source community is concerned, as long as you are using an open source tool, we are very happy that it is happening. Whether it is Fedora on your desktop, or Ubuntu or SUSE, it is okay as long as you are using a Linux environment. To have a Linux environment flourishing is more important from my perspective. When it comes to declaring a particular distro as the top position holder, it is fine because people have the freedom of choosing the distro they want. There are people who want to stick to one flavour of a particular distribution that they are more comfortable with. Making this choice is perfectly valid and legitimate, I think. There would be other sets of people who switch to different platforms because they want to learn new things and find out ways of doing the same things in other ways or with different distributions. I don’t think that is in any way negative. It is actually a very positive thing to happen because it gives people that choice. At the end of the day, whatever you do from a front-end point of view could be different, but at the back-end, it is exactly the same for all the Linux distros, be it Fedora or Ubuntu. The Linux kernel is the same, you are using the same server applications, Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC, etc. So it doesn’t matter which distribution you are using as long as you can use the apps that you require.
“Everything said, both Ubuntu and Fedora are evolving rapidly in many ways. In most cases, the last thing an end user wants to do is to shell out a lot of money for the operating system. Therefore, open source operating systems make a lot of difference. Frankly, the whole idea of cloud computing will bring in a lot of changes in the way people think.”
Q Why should an Ubuntu user switch to Fedora? Because Fedora tries to be very friendly from the free and open source perspective. For example, when you search in a Fedora search box in Firefox, all of that is going to the search engine company that you are using. It doesn’t go anywhere else. We respect the freedom of people, so we do not lock anyone into anything. We also respect the laws of the land. For example, the ability to playback an MP3 file is not available, by default, in Fedora. There are certain restrictions to what can and cannot be done from the Fedora perspective because software like MP3 is only available on certain royalty. Being a free distribution and a free of charge distribution like Fedora, this is going to be very difficult for us to do. But that doesn’t stop the end-user from installing an MP3 player to be able to listen to music.
However, I would like to add that if everything in a distro is suitable and working for a user, he should continue using it. He should not change just for the sake of changing. He should change only if he wants to explore something new or try something different and see what that entails for him. You don’t have to install a distro on your system in order to try it. You can try it on a live CD or run it on a virtual machine to test it out.
Everything said, both Ubuntu and Fedora are evolving rapidly in many ways. In most cases, the last thing an end user wants to do is to shell out a lot of money for the operating system. Therefore, open source operating systems make a lot of difference. Frankly, the whole idea of cloud computing will bring in a lot of changes in the way people think. The OS running on the desktop will not have much significance in the times to come. It is going to be more browser oriented, which would require a very high-speed network connection. When it comes to the cloud, whether it is public, private or hybrid, the desktop and OS are of little or no consequence. What you need is a high-quality secure browser. The Chrome model is an example of what we will see in the days to come. Chrome is nothing but a browser-based environment. It does have some local storage but, by and large, everything is on the cloud. You have to be online to be able to do anything. This is the direction in which everything is moving. In the long term picture, the desktop OS doesn’t really matter. What matters more is your connectivity, access to your data, what you can do with the data and how securely you can access and preserve it to ensure that it is not compromised. QHow
much is Red Hat a part of the Fedora project? Apart from managing the infrastructure and financially supporting it, what say does Red Hat have in designing Fedora? We have about 20 people who are full time Red Hat employees but work exclusively in the Fedora space. The decision-making about Fedora rests with the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee, FESCO, which is driven by the community. Red Hat cannot command anything in the project. We have always stuck to very strict principles that the community comes first and business comes second. Yes, we are supporting it and we put money into it in the sense that people are being paid full time salaries to do what they like to do best. In return, we are hoping that our project will be an interesting one for people to participate in. Whether or not we can monetise it in the future is for us to figure out from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux perspective. We can take ideas from Fedora and make them available in RHEL, so that we can officially support that for our customers. Since RHEL is also open source, Fedora is also free to take the best features from it. So this is how the Fedora community and Red Hat benefit from each other. Tomorrow, if Red Hat stops supporting Fedora with finances, the project will still continue, because the community has enough non-Red Hatters to move the project forward. It may fork into different models and different sub-groups, but it will continue.
There is a high degree of cohesion within the group. If you look at the Fedora mailing list, you will find a lot of discussions, counter points and arguments on ways that things can be done in the project. A bulk of those commenting there are community people, who look at Fedora as their own project and there is a sense of personal ownership in the project as well. QDo
you use Fedora in your personal life as well? Yes, absolutely! All my systems run Fedora, even the ones at home. QWhat
are your comments on Ubuntu’s strategy of going retail? Ubuntu joined hands with Dell to set up a retail presence in India and the idea is to increase awareness about the distro. How do you view this move? I can’t speak for Ubuntu but I can probably speak as an outsider looking into the scenario. The idea of an open
$ maxima -q (%i1) string(solve(a*x^3 + b*x^2 + c*x + d = 0, x)); (%o1) [x = (-sqrt(3)*%i/2-1/2)*(sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^318*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3-b^2*c^2)/(2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/(54*a^3))^(1/3)-(sqrt(3)*%i/2-1/2)*(3*a*c-b^2)/ (9*a^2*(sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^3-18*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3-b^2*c^2)/ (2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d-9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/(54*a^3))^(1/3))-b/ (3*a),x = (sqrt(3)*%i/2-1/2)*(sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^318*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3-b^2*c^2)/(2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/(54*a^3))^(1/3)-(-sqrt(3)*%i/2-1/2)*(3*a*c-b^2)/ (9*a^2*(sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^3-18*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3-b^2*c^2)/ (2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d-9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/(54*a^3))^(1/3))-b/ (3*a),x = (sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^3-18*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3-b^2*c^2)/ (2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d-9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/(54*a^3))^(1/3)(3*a*c-b^2)/(9*a^2*(sqrt(27*a^2*d^2+(4*b^3-18*a*b*c)*d+4*a*c^3b^2*c^2)/(2*3^(3/2)*a^2)-(27*a^2*d-9*a*b*c+2*b^3)/ (54*a^3))^(1/3))-b/(3*a)] (%i2) quit();
And that’s the power of Maxima.
Plotting graphs
Along with the algebraic processing, Maxima also supports graph plotting for the algebraic expressions, though we must specify the intervals to plot it. It can do 2-D as well as 3-D plots. The following code shows an example for each of these. And Figures 1 and 2 show the respective plots. $ maxima -q (%i1) plot2d([sin(x), atan(x), tanh(x)], [x, -5, 5])$ (%i2) plot3d(sin(abs(x) + abs(y))/(abs(x) + abs(y)),[x, -12, 12], [y, -12, 12])$ (%i3) quit();
After this first glimpse of what Maxima can do, we are now ready to move on to the details of specific topics, like expression simplification, polynomials, etc.