Co-branding?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 12:45 +0100, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I was talking recently to a couple of friends who aren't in the software 
> > industry and it came out in our recent discussions that both the 
> > companies they are working for is using Fedora on their systems. They 
> > remarked that they had no idea that Red Hat was involved in Fedora.
> > 
> > I still meet people in various places who think Red Hat has stopped 
> > working on a free distribution after Red Hat Linux 9 and continue to use 
> > it or worse a earlier version.
> > 
> 
> People don't know about Linux. People don't know (or don't care) about 
> Free and Open Source Software in general. Or open document standards for 
> that matter. Even more people do not know EPEL. I've seen experienced 
> administrators not knowing perl-LDAP is actually a package and it 
> doesn't need to come from CPAN.
> 
> Long story short; people just can't keep track. Some people will miss 
> out on huge changes. Ask people to explain global warming. Ignorance is 
> bliss. And not our problem.
> 
> > I just looked within Fedora to see if there was any hint and couldn't 
> > really find any prominent ones. The note on http://fedoraproject.org is 
> > also easily missed. Is this a deliberate decision? Should there be some 
> > of co-branding within the distribution and a prominent hint in other 
> > places?
> > 
> > Something like Fedora - Powered by Red Hat/ Sponsored by Red Hat or some 
> > such.
> > 
> 
> A *huge* -1 here
> 
> We've already spend lots of effort getting rid of the widely spread 
> prejudice of being Red Hat's pre-enterprise private little playground 
> project or distribution, and explaining that we're actually a community 
> powered project instead (Yes, sponsored by Red Hat. Yes, upstream to Red 
> Hat's Enterprise Linux product *and proud of it, might I add*).
> 
> I'm not even sure we actually did get rid of that prejudice entirely. It 
> may still exist in some people's heads.
> 
> Anyway, correctly and fully exposing how Fedora is related to Red Hat, 
> and how that works for both the community and Red Hat, with mere mortals 
> on the one side, and business customers on the other, is way more 
> important then getting the long-term users back on board because they 
> missed out on Red Hat renaming the free/gratis distribution to Fedora, 
> making Red Hat their Enterprise product.
> 
> Honestly, I don't think it's our problem someone missed out on all this 
>   back in the day. If they're really interested / valuable as 
> contributors, it'll come naturally. If not, it'll still come naturally 
> with the work of our Ambassadors and thanks to other exposure.

In a thread on fedora-ambassadors-list[1], someone was kind enough to
raise an exception from our own Greg DeKoenigsberg:

"The Fedora brand must evolve separately from Red Hat's brand. Fedora is
very important to Red Hat, but Fedora is not Red Hat. It's really
crucial to understand that distinction."

-1 to co-branding.

= = = = =
[1] http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ambassadors-list/2008-March/msg00187.html

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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