Thanks Paul (and Robyn) for your reply
On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's a big difference between "Fedora is a beta and users
are
guinea pigs," and "Fedora is a place where *any contributor* can work
on new technical features and put them in front of millions of users
as part of a free and open source software development process."
Yeah, I'm sorry for pushing the "drama" button on the first
characterization but at least I've got a decent answer from 2
different project leaders :)
Being the proving ground for new technology that might be in a future
RHEL release is only one function of the Fedora Project. Of course
that function is quite important to Red Hat, and a reason why Red Hat
continues to put substantail resources into Fedora. But it's not the
only thing the Fedora Project does, and as you know lots of
contributors have their own reasons to participate as well.
So correct me if I'm getting it wrong: you are saying that Red Hat
does in fact invest in Fedora so it can push new technologies early
and prove their usefulness and reliability before adding them to RHEL.
Robyn's addition makes it even more clear that "proving ground" is not
necessarily a bad thing, and everyone is welcome to play with the same
rules to make each Fedora release the best.
Of course, while I see the concept pretty easily, I think the problem
will not go away soon because the link between Red Hat and Fedora
appears to be pretty tight to a casual observer, and "proving ground"
can be (and I've seen it was) misrepresented to mean something like
"place where you throw things together hoping that they will stick".
We just need to pay attention and be prepared to counter this kind of
misinformation
Anyway, thank you again for your insight on the topic.
--
Gianluca Sforna
http://morefedora.blogspot.com
http://identi.ca/giallu -
http://twitter.com/giallu