ARM as a primary architecture

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 22, 2012, at 2:23 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 14:08 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>> The overwhelming bulk of the market is consumption. Not creation. And
>> the growth is in the former, not the latter.
> 
> I would still like you to consider the question of whether this holds
> for the Fedora case, though. Is Fedora as a project in fact suitable -
> either in current implementation, or in terms of our self-definition and
> long term goals - for this whole 'market' you are identifying as a
> single entity? Are we in fact truly interested in producing code for
> these content consumption devices? Is that what we're doing?

I'm not well versed on what Fedora is interested in, other than the broad relationship with Red Hat that most anyone paying attention can realize the mutual benefits.

But RHEL and Fedora are not strictly server, developer, research oriented. Business, government, educational desktops and even to some degree regular Joe User, are target markets. Perhaps Joe User is incidental. I don't know what any of these percentages are to either Red Hat or Fedora, but it's unlikely this sub-market (non-server, non-developer, non-research and non-geek) is going to behave radically differently with respect to computer form factor than the larger non-Linux computer market. These businesses, governments, schools, regular users, are looking for innovation in any case.

Is Red Hat / Fedora interested in those sub-markets? I think they are. If so, the growth area is where those sub-markets are headed and that's definitely not desktop. Laptop is still a growth area for a bit longer. But clearly the biggest growth non-server, non-developer, non-geek sub-market slice is also not desktop, nor laptop.


Chris Murphy