a new look to Red Hat's Fedora pages

[Jeremy Hogan]

On 3/23/06, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 08:03 -0500, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > I don't agree; this is no more "claiming" Fedora than any
> > "example.com/fedora" link.  Keep in mind this page has always been
> > there, and it's a way to drive people looking for Fedora support at Red
> > Hat to head for the community sites instead.  There is no escaping that
> > people *associate* Fedora with Red Hat, nor is that particularly a bad
> > thing.
>
> Fedora is a project sponsored, in part, by Red Hat.
>
> Heck, some people draw whatever conclusions they want _regardless_ of
> what the Fedora Project, Red Hat, etc... has on their site.


Right, Red Hat needs to have something about Fedora, fairly prominently
placed on their on their site. The traffic redhat.com gets is RHEL related,
and thusly the page should look like redhat.com, and lead folks gently to
the different URL and very different look/feel/voice/content of the real
Fedora home. Likewise, a fedoraproject page that mentioned Red Hat would
look like a Fedora page.

Neither creates or even exaserbates the branding confusion. Remember when
folks used to think Mandrake was further along than RHAT b/c they were on
version 7 when Red Hat was only on version 6 of "Linux", or how SuSE would
use it to their advantage and slap in a test kernel and rev their release
days "don;t settle for Red Hat 9 when you can have SuSE 10! Now with
unstable kernel!" ?

It took some education that began where folks were (completely ignorant of
Linux v. a distribution), to get them where they are now (only mostly
ignorant of Linux v. a distribuion) .

Red Hat invests more into and draws more from Fedora than any entity on the
planet and so they are linked. The name is derived from Red Hat's brand,
both sites mention each other and position the relationship, and a simple
"this one is blue, that one is red" isn't going to instantly create a
distinction when the subtext is obvious.

IMHO if Red Hat and Fedora ignored each other and pretended not to know each
other it would seem confused, fractured, or even sleazy... sort of exactly
how it was seen at launch when RH had marginalized it to "hobbyists" and
declared it "unstable for production", and alluded to the possibility of
monthly releases in order to ensure enough of the deeper pocketed folks
bought into the new horse pill and didn't stay in community land.

I shit you not, I was once told to take Fedora off my laptop for a demo by a
Red Hatter who himself didn't seem to know what it was.

There are also cross-over users to consider (ie anyone running RHEL, or
certifying their apps or hardware on it, had better be running Fedora in a
lab somewhere, and RH better tell me to do so in their site.)

At least Fedora is on their site, right out there in front of God and
everybody, and positioned as what it is. And right where RH should let
Fedora talk, well there's the handy link. If it's done right, folks can
quickly opt-in to the right place, rather than feeling like they are
optingout of one at the expense of the other. IMNSHO, it's the job of this
group to tell folks what Fedora is, and who it's for when they get to the
project pages.

--jeremy
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