Open source guru slams Red Hat

Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has announced that he is dumping Red Hat in favour of Ubuntu.

A Red Hat user for the past 13 years, Raymond decided that enough is enough and deleted the operating system.

In a letter to the open source community Raymond slammed Red Hat for throwing away a huge lead in the open source market through bad management and poor technology.

"Over the past five years, I have watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige," he wrote.

"In retrospect, I should probably have cut my losses years ago. But I had so much history with Red Hat/Fedora, and had invested so much effort in trying to fix the problems, that it was hard to even imagine breaking away."

Among the "errors" made by Red Hat, Raymond cited chronic governance problems, adding layers of complexity to the software and abandoning the desktop market altogether.

The company also failed to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with "any attitude other than blank denial".

Raymond said that he is now transferring his allegiance to Ubuntu, which he managed to get up and running within three hours.