Target market?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7/23/07, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> (warning: some of you have seen this rant before)
>

Well, yes... but keep saying it as it speaks to the core about Red
Hat/Fedora relationships etc.


> Mike McGrath (mmcgrath at redhat.com) said:
> > What is our target market supposed to be?
>
> We don't have one! Seriously, I have yet to see anything that shows that
> we have a coherent market, a plan for attack, or *anything* along those
> lines.
>
> So, we muddle along. Since no one has a plan or a target market, we
> implement whatever features the developers happen to think of, or random
> features vaguely relating to future enterprise development. Or we just
> incorporate the latest upstream.
>
> Since no one has a plan, and we don't target any market, we never have
> dedicated resources to do large amounts of cross distro work. So, we continue
> to have things like system-config-network and NetworkManager working in
> direct conflict for going on how many releases now?
>
> Since no one has a plan, and we don't target any market, we just continue
> to ship the same-old same-old distribution. Development tools? Gotta have
> those, they were there before? Two or three desktops? Well, wouldn't want
> to lose any users. And we need all the servers too.
>
> Whatever you can say about Ubuntu, they had a coherent, directed, plan,
> and they executed. We have no user-visible plan, and I think it shows.
>

For me the lack of Red Hat leadership has been a long problem. It
comes across as "we want this to be community driven." but that ends
up with a problem whenever some internal issue crosses it. Most of
this comes from the Red Hat people really trying to be nice guys all
the time, and not tick off anyone.. but it comes across as hidden
agendas and other issues.

At this point, I think we will be stumbling through F8 and probably F9
unless some people stand up and make some decisions that are going to
tick off people... or we decide that we are just focusing on becoming
the Debian of the RH world... and helping others build their Ubuntus
off of it.


>
> Right now we don't have any overriding set of goals. So we never really
> say 'no, that isn't what we want Fedora to do' to anything that fits our
> simple 'uses open source, isn't completely targeted to obsolete things'
> mantra, and we attempt to do all of these things... which means we'll
> probably fail at all of them.
>

Yes. We can't do everything, but we dont seem to want to say no. Burnout city.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"