Fedora Desktop future- RedHat moves

[Da Rock]

On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 09:02 -0700, Francis Earl wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 08:20 -0700, Paul Shaffer wrote:
> > It's called "mindshare."  And since when do you define relevance for Redhat's customers?  Sounds rather presumptuous, to me.  You mention the mindshare concept later, but don't seem to understand it works both ways.  And it's a huge advantage in a competitive marketplace.
> 
> I am simply stating RedHat's stance on the matter, they are defining
> this themselves. It is hard, however, for RedHat to compete in the
> consumer desktop desktop space while playing the rules of Microsoft and
> Apple. You likely didn't pay for Fedora, yet you expect certain things,
> I think that is a little more presumptuous.
> 
> > Ya think?  Ok "strides" compared to what - the over 90% share M$ enjoys?  Methinks we got alot more stridin' to do.
> 
> That has NOTHING to do with what I meant, although in fairness I wasn't
> clear on that. What I meant was that Linux is convincing many companies
> to become part of the open source ecosystem. At this point, use by the
> average home user isn't a priority. RedHat wants a good, strong story to
> take to consumers before it ever tries to enter that space.
> 

> > I suppose Redhat more prefers neglect to rape.  Or maybe passive coercion.  But this approach is doomed to failure as we've already seen by Ubuntu's success.  Redhat's ability to ensure anything in this industry is doubtful and becoming less a factor all the time as long as they and people like you decry the "ignorant" society and people who can't add a repo.  Fedora has become a niche oddity in the Linux distro field because they view the vast majority of potential users as scapegoats for some holier than thou OS delusion.
> 
> Define the success Ubuntu has seen. Ubuntu is NOT making money, at all.
> How are they successful, because more people who aren't spending a dime
> have used their software than they have Fedora?
> 
> As much as you seem to not comprehend, the consumer desktop is NOT a
> priority. Novell has made such things a priority, and they are barely in
> the black today. RedHats focus is on developing a better story on the
> CORPORATE desktop, making more inroads into the corporate space, and
> maybe one day developing a desktop that consumers would buy.
> 


And you know what; (and I take this from experience) a ceo or other
employee will want to use what they use at home and are comfortable
with. Which is why people will move away from Fedora because they can do
exactly what they want from the get go, and yes, this is what they're
used to. I'm a sysadmin and I will use whatever gets the job done the
quickest- most users are the same. For reference I'm using Fedora simply
for the fact it was reasonably easy to setup and use my tv card on.

If Fedora doesn't start addressing this it will go the way of the
dinosaurs- period. Other distros ARE addressing this issue (debian,
ubuntu, hell even freebsd) and this is where the users will go. One or
two users will not be enough to stop this tide.


> RedHat is a profitable company today, and is focused on bettering the
> Linux ecosystem. Considering they were the first company to make money
> from Linux in any note worthy way, and that Linux today is a $45 billion
> dollar industry, I think they're doing ok.
> 
> Guess how much of that $45 billion is related to consumer desktops, and
> you'll see how irrelevant this debate really is.
>