When to rebrand fedora?

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Bryan Kearney wrote:
> Heck... why limit to demos? It could be that someone releases an open 
> source Alfresco appliance for real use.
> 

I'll take two examples; a collaborative, calendering and mail server 
solution (named "product" for convenience), and a (simple?) 
DHCP/DNS/Network appliance piece of hardware (named "appliance" for 
convenience).

The obvious differences are:

- demo'ing a product in a certain setup as opposed to releasing it, and

- demo'ing a product that uses Linux as the (preferred?) operating 
system, as opposed to releasing that product, which usually doesn't come 
with the Linux operating system, let alone Fedora, and

- demo'ing or releasing an appliance product (the completely different 
line of products), where the operating system doesn't actually matter or 
it wouldn't be an appliance in the first place. Take this with a grain 
of salt as we all know we're trying to first establish a "de-facto 
standard" for a minimal Base OS third parties can build their appliance 
on top of, while, from a different perspective, a real appliance is not 
a "yum install" the way we are used to within Fedora, and should involve 
recompiling the software for purposes such as optimization and 
stability. Kind of a moot point in this discussion, but I hope you 
appreciate where I see a difference between the two (eg. "product" and 
appliance).

In the first two cases ("product") you don't care which distribution 
runs your demo you're just gonna want to take the most convenient (and 
I'd like to see Fedora have the upper hand there, from both the 
advertising, marketing as well as the potential revenue of ISV's getting 
involved in Fedora -just because we do things right this means revenue 
for all of FOSS), without requiring rebranding.

In the latter case you do care which distribution you base the appliance 
on, and you do want to rebrand, no matter what the effort might involve. 
Still, Fedora should have the upper hand here in that it should be the 
overall easiest, but it's an entirely different target audience, with 
different demands, wishes, targets, audiences and products. Like I 
suggested, once we enable re-compilation of software, but even before, 
it is not Fedora anymore, and it's entirely different and we do want to 
require rebranding.

I hope some of this makes sense I don't feel I'm able to make myself as 
clear as I want to.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip