Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Jonathan Roberts]

> > It wouldn't be a burden to tell the world that we are doing what we are 
> > doing then. One simple way to do this it to just blog more often. Our 
> > engineers do that sometimes but way less than ideal. 
> 
> NURRRRRR.  BZZZZZT.  WRONG WRONG WRONG.
> 
> If an engineer happens to take time out of their busy lives, and time 
> away from doing awesome feature work for Fedora 9, then consider it a 
> bonus.  Expecting this from any engineer is just insane.
> 
> The ideal situation is we have people that care about Fedora that may 
> not necessarily be technical that will create buzz for the engineers who 
> don't necessarily have perfect verbal/hype skills.  These are two 
> completely different skill sets.  Don't confuse them.

Which is exactly what we started to try and do last release with the
interviews. I think some of them were pretty successful too with 4/5
hitting the front page of digg and getting several hundred diggs. Of
course this relied on the engineers giving a bit of their time to answer
questions but it definitely worked. 

Also, I think it's important to note that Fedora's image is making
progress. The latest Linux Format (available in the UK and the US I
think) had this to say: "...thinks Fedora 8 knocks the stuffing out of
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon"; "In fact we'd even go as far to say that Fedora is
a real threat to Ubuntu now that they've largely caught up with Ubuntu
in terms of user-friendlyness and ease of use". 

I still think we can do an even better job at highlighting the great
work that our developers do, the new features they create and how this
gets into upstream! But let's also remember that we are *definitely*
making progress in this regard!!! 

I'll start a new thread later on about things that we can do to keep
improving in this regard, because while it's useful to be aware of
mis-perceptions etc it's far more productive to talk about what we can
specifically do that will keep improving the Feodra Marketing effort...

Best wishes all, 

Jon


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