Delay? Looks bad for Fedora

[Lauri Jutila]

> Before Fedora was announced, I was about to give up on Red Hat (after
> using 7.3, 8, and 9, every day, all day) and begin searching for a
> ...
> ...
> making much more of an effort to test the builds, and find and report
> bugs than I ever did for previous Red Hat releases.  As soon as I have
> time I'll probably even start fixing bugs and submitting patches.  I
> never did that for previous Red Hat relases.
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one.  Perhaps some people will switch away
> from Red Hat because of the changes to Fedora, but I'll bet that there
> will be a net INCREASE in users.

Torrey, you're not the only one. I have exactly the same thoughts and
experiences. In my opinion, Red Hat did an excellent move of
reorganizing their software offerings and development into RHEL and
Fedora.

Fedora brings to community what many of us have been looking for: a
distribution for "early adopters, enthusiasts and developers", as
Fedora's web site says. Finally you can get all the latest and greatest
for Red Hat based distribution effortlessly.

If you are running a business, you'll be considering RHEL or Fedora,
depending on your budget and in-house expertise. If you are a DIY-type
Linux hacker, you'll go with Fedora (or with any other Linux
distribution) in production environment. OTOH, if you need certified
platform with vendor support, you'll choose RHEL.

I just can't understand why some people have hard time comprehending
that Red Hat is a company, which ultimate goal is to make money and
create value to its shareholders. The only way to make money is to
charge someone for something. In their case, it's RHEL subscription
(plus training, professional services, et al.) and that keeps them in
business. That'll help them to pay salaries for dozens of developers
that work for Red Hat and produce Open Source software for RHEL, Fedora
users and the whole OSS community.

Quoting from redhat.com:
"Balance means building a successful company without sacrificing
customer trust. And creating shareholder value without severing our ties
to the open source community."

IMO, they have pretty well kept that balance. And if you're going to
make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. Some people will not
like/tolerate Red Hat's move, but that's a small minority, IMHO. I'm
more than happy to see Fedora being incubated by Red Hat. It's a
community project, backed up by one of the largest Linux vendors, and
that gives the project more leverage than anything else.

All right, that's enough opinions for today. :)

-- 
Lauri Jutila
Chief Linux Fellow, Reforge
lists at reforge.fi
http://www.reforge.fi