[Ambassadors] LinuxCon EU and Fedora Server

[Jiri Eischmann]

Matthew Miller píše v Út 04. 11. 2014 v 16:16 -0500:
> In reading Jiri's report at
> <http://eischmann.wordpress.com/2014/10/22/fedora-linuxcon-europe-2014/>,
> one thing I found particularly interesting was:
> 
> > People were more interested in Fedora Server which is different from
> > most events where people are mostly interested in Workstation, but
> > it’s not surprising considering the audience. It really helps to
> > advertise a specialized product because you can clearly say: if
> > you’re interested in server OSes, this is what we have for you and it
> > has these interesting features. That’s why I’m glad we have Fedora
> > Server. From the marketing point of view, it’s much more appealing to
> > have a solution (server product) than just a lego to build it. Quite
> > a few people were interested in Fedora as a future of enterprise
> > Linux because what they work with and care about is Red Hat
> > Enterprise Linux.
> 
> This is great feedback, and seems to show that the plan is working. :)
> 
> Do you think this is something about the LinuxCon EU audience in
> specific?

Yes, LinuxCon is quite specific in this. There is a quite high number of
DevOps there. We go to very technical conferences such as FOSDEM and
DevConf.cz, but they're mostly focused on developers while at LinuxCon
there are many people from the operations, too, who use Linux in
interesting deployments.

>  Should we focus more Server efforts there next year? 

Definitely. The Workstation product was also popular there, but it's
popular at most events we go to. LinuxCon was different in a way that
the interest in the server was high, maybe higher than in the
workstation. We were not quite ready for it and the server demo was
prepared ad hoc.

> Are there other conferences where that would likely be the case?

I don't have an answer for this. LinuxCon is the only conference of this
kind I've been to, all others have been focused on average open source
audience or developers.
I would like to ask other ambassadors to identify conference where there
could be high interest in the Server. That's definitely something we can
discuss at the EMEA FAD.
 
>  Was there any specific feedback that would be helpful to bring back to the Server
> WG?

I think the only repeating feedback was: we would appreciate a longer
lifetime of the Server.
A very frequent question everywhere is why we are doing Fedora Server if
there is CentOS which is now the official open source project of Red
Hat. I think it's worth having some clear official message about this
explaining differences between Fedora Server and CentOS goals, what
Fedora Server means to CentOS etc.

Jiri