Fedora's way forward

[Eric S. Raymond]

Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com>:
> Perhaps, or maybe you were just like Canute only you were saying that
> the tide would come in....

Yes, I think that's arguably true about my original work identifying
the many-eyeballs effect and so forth.  Richard Gabriel came within an
angstrom of getting all that ten years before I did in his "Worse is
Better" paper, and I've been saying for years that somebody else would have
between 1994-2000 if I hadn't.

The evangelism to the suits, though?  Not so much.  I went out on a hell 
of a limb those first couple of years.  We have the luxury of forgetting that
nowadays because the crazy/nutty things I was saying then turned into
conventional wisdom.  Someday it will probably grow dim even in *my* mind
how much sweat it took for me to accomplish that.  But it hasn't yet.

> That sounds more like Ubuntu's goals than Fedora. Fedora is intended to be
> a testing ground for doing cool and exciting things with free software. In
> the Ubuntu case you are making some interesting arguments, but Fedora isn't
> intended to be Mum's new desktop, cool if it works out that way but its
> not the design spec.

OK.  So the next question is, do *Red Hat's* goals no longer include
world desktop domination?  Because if that's true, I need to find a distro
that hasn't ... er ... lost its idealism.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>