Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Mukul Dharwadkar wrote:

> It's really going to be very hard if we still continue to measure our 
> success on popularity in Developer community. Although it is a good 
> thing to be accepted by Developers, the true measure of success is the 
> acceptance by the user community in which, I am sorry to say, Ubuntu 
> beats Fedora hands down.

"True measure of success"?

The most persistent fallacy in the open source world is that desktop usage 
by grandma and grandpa is the "true measure of success".  If the "true 
measure of success" is number of novice desktop users, then Microsoft is 
beating all of us by such a wide margin that we may as well not bother.

Ubuntu is extremely good at polishing what currently exists for new Linux 
users.  That's a good goal.  But it is not Fedora's primary goal.

Fedora's goal is to put together the best *and most free* general purpose 
operating system with *the strongest community of contributors* in order 
to *drive innovation*.

> We have to come up with ways to make sure that Linux in general and 
> specifically Fedora becomes the OS of choice. It's a large market out 
> there and we can make it if we get our priorities right.

I agree that we must keep working to make Fedora more useful to more 
people.  Note that the differences in that regard between Ubuntu and 
Fedora shrink with every release.

We must not, however, compromise the Free Software principles that give us 
our strength.

--g

-- 
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
"To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked"