DE discussion summary

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:09:59 +0100, you wrote:

>On 10 February 2014 10:02, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>> I find the idea that the long and historic relationship between GNOME and
>> Fedora could turn around so quickly like that to be very strange
>
>The fact we're even considering asking the question "which DE do we
>want to use for workstation" is just crazy.

I would turn that around and ask why isn't Red Hat evaulating what DE
they are using (if they aren't)?

I have no illusions about the nature of the open source world.  The
products we use - Fedora, GNOME, the Linux kernel, Java, gcc, etc. -
would not exist in the form that are today with the financial backing
of the companies involved, and Red Hat is a rather significant part of
that funding.

To cut off certain people, yes the volunteer time of all the free-time
developers (whether their full time employment is also open source or
not) is important, and would be missed if it went away, but the heavy
lifiting is done by paid employees.

So given that Red Hat is putting money into this, I would expect Red
Hat to want to periodically evaluate the value being created just like
Fedora is attempting to.

I would also hope that Red Hat is evaluating other areas they expend
significant resources, because at the end of the day the continued
success of Linux relies on Red Hat being around, which means being
smart about where they spend their limited resources.