Regarding re branded Fedora Remixes using Fedora community resources.

["Jóhann B. Guðmundsson"]

On 10/28/2010 06:40 AM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 10/22/2010 06:20 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
>> Should not those remixes be at least required to provide clear easy accessible and documentation on how those remixes deviate from Fedora?
>> ( As is being done with the Omega remix [2][3] )
>
> Since I do the Omega remix, I can commit to any best practise 
> guidelines that Fedora Project might have or even help write those but 
> lets not get heavy handed.  We can only suggest but active enforcement 
> is not feasible or desirable IMO.   Afaik,  Fusion Linux doesn't 
> rebuild any Fedora packages and treating bugs from installation of 
> proprietary drivers etc can be handled just like how we handle it now, 
> when the user has done it manually.
>

I'm not quite sure how wize it is for a person that uses or atleast used 
[1] Fedora official channels to promote their own product over Fedora 
itself should be included in the writing of best practises/guidelines or 
having any saying in that matter in general unless of course the board 
approves and thus in a sense promotes such activities.

Now there is a distinction between Fedora users using third party 
packages or other application he has chosen to install then dealing with 
a users that are using unofficial remix of Fedora.

The difference is we know what we ship and we can ask the end user if he 
has changed any of the defaults we have ship and he will be able to 
provide us with the answer but we don't know what changes unofficial 
remix has done to the official Fedora and neither does the novice end 
user because those that did remixed the official Fedora decide to make 
some under the hood changes then decide to include some popular 
proprietary based driver/application on top of it to gain popularity or 
to promote their own software.

Even if ( as was in your case that ) that the unofficial remix provides 
clear and easy accessible documentation on how the remixed deviates from 
Fedora it still forces/requires the person 
(maintainer/triager/reporter/help desk/) interacting with the end user 
to try to dig up how the remixed deviates from Fedora encase those 
changes were the source of that's individual problems.

Imagine the time and resources spent in chasing down every unofficial 
remix that the end user might be running..

Now image that after you have been treating that end user as he was 
running official Fedora go through all the lengthy time spending 
diagnosing the problem, unable to duplicate it your self only to find 
out later that the end user is running x unofficial remix of Fedora and 
now you yes you because most likely the end user has absolutely no Idea 
what he's doing have to start running around the internet hunting down 
what ever changes that remix author has done differently from Fedora and 
meanwhile the user that actually has an Fedora related problem sits 
there waiting for a response on a forum bugzilla on irc etc finally 
gives up because nobody responded to him because everybody is to busy 
running around fixes everybody's unofficial remix problems out there and 
he curse Fedora and ends up switching to another distro.

It comes logically to me when remixes are forced to remove the Fedora 
trademark they become something completely else and should treated like 
any other Linux distro out there as in second to Fedora's own product 
and users base.


[1] 
http://www.mail-archive.com/fedora-announce-list@redhat.com/msg01470.html