new daylight savings time

[Benjamin Franz]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:

> New, untested things have to appear first somewhere.  What do you think would 
> be more effective?

I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas 
and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu', 
and so on. Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's 
'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat 
has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base 
community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.

> Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual 
> experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out 
> updates painlessly across versions with big changes.

Granted. And I expect some major bobbles in their future. One or two won't 
kill them, a steady stream of problems would.

> Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to 
> anyone?

Emphatically: Yes!

Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately 
based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily 
out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.

Only a tiny percentage of the end users will act as testers. Only a small 
percentage of those will contribute code or fixes. But without the end 
users _you don't get the testers or developer, either_.  If 1% of users 
submit bug reports, and 0.01% of users contribute code (pulling all of 
these numbers from thin air - I honestly believe the real numbers are 
_lower_ based on my own software releases over the years), then you need a 
LOT of end users to maintain and develop a distribution.

What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't 
going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system 
that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think 
that you can raise a crop without the field below it.

What do masses of silent end users bring to the table? Only *everything else*.

>  There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you 
> don't/can't.  A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL 
> customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora. 
> They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain 
> by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.

A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
  for a prediction and keeping track of one’s past record of accuracy."
                     -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness