Shibboleth Developers

[Ryan Muldoon <>]

I agree with Mark's comments that the Linux market is just going through
another stage of maturity, in that basically there are two product lines
being established.  Red Hat has their Enterprise line, and Novell/SUSE has
theirs.  Then the rest of the linux world basically has what we're all used
to - a distribution that is for workstations and small to mid-sized servers,
with a 6-9 month upgrade cycle.  I don't think that Fedora is that big of a
change for Red Hat - from what I've read on the lists, there is are more Red
Hat employees working on Fedora than were working on Red Hat Linux 9, so I
doubt that quality will go down.  They are just hoping to make it more of a
community effort, which I think is a good idea, provided that they maintain
their standards, which they intend to do.  The longevity of patches is a
concern, but again, I don't think that there will be much of a change from
the status quo.  Red Hat only supports non-Enterprise software for a year
anyway.  Maybe with more of a community behind it, Fedora will have patches
available for longer.  But I doubt it.

To me, the real interest with shifts in Red Hat policy is their Open Source
Architecture. http://www.redhat.com/software/architecture/
Basically, it is an attempt to outline their end-to-end strategy, using all
open source software.  Notably, they are looking at web AuthN/Z type
solutions, so this is an area that some Internet2 people might want to talk
to them about.  If Red Hat ships shib-friendly architectures in their
Enterprise line, it would seem that it would be much easier to convince
vendors to support shib.

    --Ryan

On 11/5/03 12:43 PM, "Neal McBurnett" 
<>
 wrote:

> Good comments so far.  Some pointers:
> 
> http://fedora.redhat.com/
> 
> Availability of the third Fedora Core test release (codename Severn)
> via BitTorrent (especially great for the day of release):
> 
> http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/severn-binary-iso.torrent
> http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/severn-src-iso.torrent
> 
> The main concern I see with Fedora is the question of is how easy it
> will be to get security patches/errata for old releases, and how long they
> will be available.
> 
> That is still being worked out:
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2003-November/msg00421.html
> 
> I would think that the risk would be small for vanilla servers, but
> we'll have to see what they deliver, and what the competition does,
> and where developers and users focus their energy.  It certainly
> does make me pay more attention to Debian.  And with Novell
> buying SuSE....
> 
> http://slashdot.org/articles/03/11/05/0133259.shtml?tid=126&tid=143&tid=163&ti
> d=187
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
> Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60
> 
>