After reading a lot of pressreleases and surfing around reading papers in magazines about fedora, I keep wondering what is Fedora? And specifically what is fedora to the general pulic! Don't get me wrong, I've known linux since before RedHat was born, and been a fedora user since early pre fc1. Why do I raise this question then? Well the tought that occurs to me is: is fedora a community driven project or is it a Redhat EL playground. Today it is both.... But when you read pressreleases and info about fedora in the papers, fedora do not stand on its own. Many magazines writes similair to: "Fedora is the test version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and to me that has the sound of a product in development or in beta. Then there are magazines that occationally get it right and talks about a community driven project, and the next thing that occurs is you read a copyright notice. When installing F10 you get a "Copyright © 2003-2008 RedHat, Inc. and others. All rights reserved." Well there is the 'others' part... but it do not have the sound of community, well others.... I'm not writing this as an against RH thing, if it hadn't been for RH, 'the linux os' wouldn't progressed to what it is today. I'm writing this because I think it is not entirely clear what fedora is to the general public. This is important to gain ground, to get the message out that fedora is not a testbed product, but a product that incorporates new leading edge features.
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
btw, F10 is king!
//J
+1
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson@fxdev.comwrote:
After reading a lot of pressreleases and surfing around reading papers in magazines about fedora, I keep wondering what is Fedora? And specifically what is fedora to the general pulic! Don't get me wrong, I've known linux since before RedHat was born, and been a fedora user since early pre fc1. Why do I raise this question then? Well the tought that occurs to me is: is fedora a community driven project or is it a Redhat EL playground. Today it is both.... But when you read pressreleases and info about fedora in the papers, fedora do not stand on its own. Many magazines writes similair to: "Fedora is the test version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and to me that has the sound of a product in development or in beta. Then there are magazines that occationally get it right and talks about a community driven project, and the next thing that occurs is you read a copyright notice. When installing F10 you get a "Copyright (c) 2003-2008 RedHat, Inc. and others. All rights reserved." Well there is the 'others' part... but it do not have the sound of community, well others.... I'm not writing this as an against RH thing, if it hadn't been for RH, 'the linux os' wouldn't progressed to what it is today. I'm writing this because I think it is not entirely clear what fedora is to the general public. This is important to gain ground, to get the message out that fedora is not a testbed product, but a product that incorporates new leading edge features.
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
btw, F10 is king!
//J
-- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:56:59PM +0100, Jonas Karlsson wrote:
After reading a lot of pressreleases and surfing around reading papers in magazines about fedora, I keep wondering what is Fedora? And specifically what is fedora to the general pulic! Don't get me wrong, I've known linux since before RedHat was born, and been a fedora user since early pre fc1. Why do I raise this question then? Well the tought that occurs to me is: is fedora a community driven project or is it a Redhat EL playground. Today it is both.... But when you read pressreleases and info about fedora in the papers, fedora do not stand on its own. Many magazines writes similair to: "Fedora is the test version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and to me that has the sound of a product in development or in beta. Then there are magazines that occationally get it right and talks about a community driven project, and the next thing that occurs is you read a copyright notice. When installing F10 you get a "Copyright © 2003-2008 RedHat, Inc. and others. All rights reserved." Well there is the 'others' part... but it do not have the sound of community, well others.... I'm not writing this as an against RH thing, if it hadn't been for RH, 'the linux os' wouldn't progressed to what it is today. I'm writing this because I think it is not entirely clear what fedora is to the general public. This is important to gain ground, to get the message out that fedora is not a testbed product, but a product that incorporates new leading edge features.
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
Fedora is the way how Red Hat contribute to Open Source and Community.
-- Anton
This is an important notice, and a very effective point of view. But when it comes to debates and hot conversation regarding whether fedora is the testing playground for Redhat Ent. or not, it becomes a weak point I guess. But after all, nothing is truly free and to be honest fedora is one of the most stable releases among open source Linux bases operating system. Therefore, I usually tend to insure focusing on this point, "testing playground", and finish its discussion before I go into explaining more about fedora's features.
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 1:04 PM, Anton Arapov aarapov@fedoraproject.orgwrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 12:56:59PM +0100, Jonas Karlsson wrote:
After reading a lot of pressreleases and surfing around reading papers in magazines about fedora, I keep wondering what is Fedora? And specifically what is fedora to the general pulic! Don't get me wrong, I've known linux since before RedHat was born, and been a fedora user since early pre fc1. Why do I raise this question then? Well the tought that occurs to me is: is fedora a community driven project or is it a Redhat EL playground. Today it is both.... But when you read pressreleases and info about fedora in the papers, fedora do not stand on its own. Many magazines writes similair to: "Fedora is the test version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux" and to me that has the sound of a product in development or in beta. Then there are magazines that occationally get it right and talks about a community driven project, and the next thing that occurs is you read a copyright notice. When installing F10 you get a "Copyright (c) 2003-2008 RedHat, Inc. and others. All rights reserved." Well there is the 'others' part... but it do not have the sound of community, well others.... I'm not writing this as an against RH thing, if it hadn't been for RH, 'the linux os' wouldn't progressed to what it is today. I'm writing this because I think it is not entirely clear what fedora is to the general public. This is important to gain ground, to get the message out that fedora is not a testbed product, but a product that incorporates new leading edge features.
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
Fedora is the way how Red Hat contribute to Open Source and Community.
-- Anton
-- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson@fxdev.com wrote:
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
So I'm on both sides of the fence - Fedora contributor and RHEL customer (as I suspect that many of us are). And the question does come up a lot, so here's my "stock response":
Fedora's goal is to be the best of what works today. RHEL's goal is to be the best of what works and is supportable for the next 7 years. These are fundamentally incompatible goals, which cannot be served by one distribution.
Fedora accomplishes it's goal by being a completely open and transparent R&D lab, for both Red Hat and members of the community. Anyone, whether you're working on Fedora in your spare time (as I do), or if you have a mandate from your manager at Red Ha because they'd like to see a particular feature in the next version of RHEL, can get a feature into Fedora by following the same process. Let me make some cases in point, using some features from Fedora 10.
First, from the community side, Hans de Goede (now a Red Hat employee, but that's really irrelevant - he wasn't when he started work on the feature and is employed doing something completely different), decided that we needed better webcam support in Fedora. He defined the problem space, worked to implement the drivers required in the upstream kernel, and packaged a library to provide v4l2 access to v4l1 apps (sorry for the technical details there).
From the Red Hat "features we'd like to see in RHEL" side (note that
this is speculation as to the motivation for this feature, but pretty educated speculation), libvirt (which is the hypervisor-agnostic virtualization mangement layer in Fedora/RHEL) can now remotely provision storage and perform remote installations. These features were again implemented upstream (even though we are upstream for libvirt), thus making the improvements available for any consumer of libvirt, Fedora included, packaged in Fedora, put through a test plan, and accepted.
If it really were a fact that "Fedora is a perpetual beta of RHEL" were true, two things would not be true:
1) The first feature would not be in Fedora, it provides very little "enterprise" value (however does provide a lot of value in that we now have a wider range of hardware that Just Works(TM) ).
2) I would not be a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) which decides on the technical direction of Fedora and is in charge of the feature process.
I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way to spread this sort of messaging.
-Jon
On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 5:15 AM, Jon Stanley jonstanley@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson@fxdev.com wrote:
<snippped>
I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way to spread this sort of messaging.
Jon:
+1 and an excellent explanation.
John Babich Volunteer, Fedora Project
On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 21:15 -0500, Jon Stanley wrote:
So I'm on both sides of the fence - Fedora contributor and RHEL customer (as I suspect that many of us are). And the question does come up a lot, so here's my "stock response":
Fedora's goal is to be the best of what works today. RHEL's goal is to be the best of what works and is supportable for the next 7 years. These are fundamentally incompatible goals, which cannot be served by one distribution.
Fedora accomplishes it's goal by being a completely open and transparent R&D lab, for both Red Hat and members of the community. Anyone, whether you're working on Fedora in your spare time (as I do), or if you have a mandate from your manager at Red Ha because they'd like to see a particular feature in the next version of RHEL, can get a feature into Fedora by following the same process. Let me make some cases in point, using some features from Fedora 10.
First, from the community side, Hans de Goede (now a Red Hat employee, but that's really irrelevant - he wasn't when he started work on the feature and is employed doing something completely different), decided that we needed better webcam support in Fedora. He defined the problem space, worked to implement the drivers required in the upstream kernel, and packaged a library to provide v4l2 access to v4l1 apps (sorry for the technical details there).
From the Red Hat "features we'd like to see in RHEL" side (note that
this is speculation as to the motivation for this feature, but pretty educated speculation), libvirt (which is the hypervisor-agnostic virtualization mangement layer in Fedora/RHEL) can now remotely provision storage and perform remote installations. These features were again implemented upstream (even though we are upstream for libvirt), thus making the improvements available for any consumer of libvirt, Fedora included, packaged in Fedora, put through a test plan, and accepted.
If it really were a fact that "Fedora is a perpetual beta of RHEL" were true, two things would not be true:
- The first feature would not be in Fedora, it provides very little
"enterprise" value (however does provide a lot of value in that we now have a wider range of hardware that Just Works(TM) ).
- I would not be a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) which decides on the technical direction of Fedora and is in charge of the feature process.
I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way to spread this sort of messaging.
+1 The best among the answers I have seen/read ....
I have written this on my blog : http://satish.playdrupal.com/?q=what_is_fedora
let me know if there is a better place to write this on (may be LWN) or please digg this : http://digg.com/linux_unix/What_is_FEDORA
Thanks Satish
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 09:15:21PM -0500, Jon Stanley wrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson@fxdev.com wrote:
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question, what is fedora?
So I'm on both sides of the fence - Fedora contributor and RHEL customer (as I suspect that many of us are). And the question does come up a lot, so here's my "stock response":
Fedora's goal is to be the best of what works today. RHEL's goal is to be the best of what works and is supportable for the next 7 years. These are fundamentally incompatible goals, which cannot be served by one distribution.
Fedora accomplishes it's goal by being a completely open and transparent R&D lab, for both Red Hat and members of the community. Anyone, whether you're working on Fedora in your spare time (as I do), or if you have a mandate from your manager at Red Ha because they'd like to see a particular feature in the next version of RHEL, can get a feature into Fedora by following the same process. Let me make some cases in point, using some features from Fedora 10.
First, from the community side, Hans de Goede (now a Red Hat employee, but that's really irrelevant - he wasn't when he started work on the feature and is employed doing something completely different), decided that we needed better webcam support in Fedora. He defined the problem space, worked to implement the drivers required in the upstream kernel, and packaged a library to provide v4l2 access to v4l1 apps (sorry for the technical details there).
From the Red Hat "features we'd like to see in RHEL" side (note that
this is speculation as to the motivation for this feature, but pretty educated speculation), libvirt (which is the hypervisor-agnostic virtualization mangement layer in Fedora/RHEL) can now remotely provision storage and perform remote installations. These features were again implemented upstream (even though we are upstream for libvirt), thus making the improvements available for any consumer of libvirt, Fedora included, packaged in Fedora, put through a test plan, and accepted.
If it really were a fact that "Fedora is a perpetual beta of RHEL" were true, two things would not be true:
- The first feature would not be in Fedora, it provides very little
"enterprise" value (however does provide a lot of value in that we now have a wider range of hardware that Just Works(TM) ).
- I would not be a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) which decides on the technical direction of Fedora and is in charge of the feature process.
I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way to spread this sort of messaging.
Jon, this was a great explanation and reflects exactly the way I try to educate journalists who are reporting on Fedora. I would encourage anyone who wants to contribute to the Marketing team to generalize this onto a wiki page.
2008/11/29 Paul W. Frields stickster@gmail.com
On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 09:15:21PM -0500, Jon Stanley wrote:
On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:56 AM, Jonas Karlsson jonas.karlsson@fxdev.com wrote:
Am I compleatly wrong or have anyone of you been asking the question,
what
is fedora?
So I'm on both sides of the fence - Fedora contributor and RHEL customer (as I suspect that many of us are). And the question does come up a lot, so here's my "stock response":
Fedora's goal is to be the best of what works today. RHEL's goal is to be the best of what works and is supportable for the next 7 years. These are fundamentally incompatible goals, which cannot be served by one distribution.
Fedora accomplishes it's goal by being a completely open and transparent R&D lab, for both Red Hat and members of the community. Anyone, whether you're working on Fedora in your spare time (as I do), or if you have a mandate from your manager at Red Ha because they'd like to see a particular feature in the next version of RHEL, can get a feature into Fedora by following the same process. Let me make some cases in point, using some features from Fedora 10.
First, from the community side, Hans de Goede (now a Red Hat employee, but that's really irrelevant - he wasn't when he started work on the feature and is employed doing something completely different), decided that we needed better webcam support in Fedora. He defined the problem space, worked to implement the drivers required in the upstream kernel, and packaged a library to provide v4l2 access to v4l1 apps (sorry for the technical details there).
From the Red Hat "features we'd like to see in RHEL" side (note that
this is speculation as to the motivation for this feature, but pretty educated speculation), libvirt (which is the hypervisor-agnostic virtualization mangement layer in Fedora/RHEL) can now remotely provision storage and perform remote installations. These features were again implemented upstream (even though we are upstream for libvirt), thus making the improvements available for any consumer of libvirt, Fedora included, packaged in Fedora, put through a test plan, and accepted.
If it really were a fact that "Fedora is a perpetual beta of RHEL" were true, two things would not be true:
- The first feature would not be in Fedora, it provides very little
"enterprise" value (however does provide a lot of value in that we now have a wider range of hardware that Just Works(TM) ).
- I would not be a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering
Committee (FESCo) which decides on the technical direction of Fedora and is in charge of the feature process.
I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way to spread this sort of messaging.
Jon, this was a great explanation and reflects exactly the way I try to educate journalists who are reporting on Fedora. I would encourage anyone who wants to contribute to the Marketing team to generalize this onto a wiki page.
In terms of finding a way to "spread this sort of messaging" - and forgive me if this has already been discussed, but I didn't see anything in archives - has anyone ever given any thought to doing a Fedora analyst day? Similar to what a public company would do, minus that whole dreadfully boring "profit" part of the day :)
Maybe financial analysts would not be quite as interested (but perhaps they would, who knows) - but it would be a good way to interface with industry analysts and press people and really drive this type of message home - along with giving some depth to the subject of "how fedora users are counted," which I saw is also a point of pain when it comes to reading what press people are writing, discussing what Fedora believes their share of the market is (does anyone do this?)... and just generally giving some longer, informative sessions to a lot of analysts and press people at once to clear up any misinformation stored in their brains. Not to mention give them reasons to have and keep Fedora on their radar when it comes to writing reports or stories. And just start developing good ongoing rapport with these people.
A lot of depth can be covered in a 1/2 day or day that just can't be covered in a half-hour briefing or interview. It's something that could be done the day before / after someone else's analyst day (RH, or anyone else who would be bringing in the desired audience of people) - or really even before/during/after any conference where all the appropriate parties would likely be (get a room for a 1/2 day during linuxcon)... or even do something streaming online for a first attempt.
Just a thought. :)
-Robyn
PS. Hi! I'm new here. ;)
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Saadeddine AlSaidi -
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