On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 08:23:43 -0500,
Wade Hampton <wadehamptoniv(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One observation and I hope Red Hat is reading this: Before RHL became
Fedora, Dell would have most likely used RHL as they already had
agreements with Red Hat for servers. Notice that the first Linux
option will most likely be SuSE and that Fedora is mentioned as a
possible later alternative, but no mention (so far) of Red Hat. 5
years ago, Red Hat WAS Linux to many, especially PHBs. This IS market
erosion.
A few years ago they would have been selling the linux boxes to a different
type of customer than they may be looking at today. Fedora wouldn't make
much sense. They would be better off putting RHEL on them rather than Fedora
if they are going to support them.
I think the announcements by ESR further reflect this erosion in
mindshare and low-end market penetration by Red Hat. Maybe the OLPC
effort and new efforts on the part of the Fedora community will
reverse this trend but it may be too late.
I am not sure that the mind share for Fedora has really dropped on the low end.
A few years ago people buoght the boxed sets because downloading images and
CD blanks were more expensive. There is more likely a lot more people using
Fedora now than there were people using pre-Fedora versions of RH. They just
get the software a different way now.
It may be that other distros have grown faster than Fedora for desktop use
by "normal" people. This may or may not be a problem for Fedora.
The whole Dell thing doesn't make much difference to me. I buy the computers
I use in parts or acquire hand me downs and I won't be buying a machine from
Dell. I certainly wouldn't use any preinstalled OS of theirs, Linux or not.
I trust Redhat a lot more than Dell, not to include spyware type applications
on the system or misuse information obtained when getting updates from their
servers.