The Inquirier on F17

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 08:29:30AM +0200, Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora at nicubunu.ro> wrote:
> > But I think we all agree the linked article is really bad written and it
> > would he useful to "help" those news sources to improve their reporting.
> 
> In addition, I'd love to hear some sort of official word about the
> "Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that
> eventually end up in the firm's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
> operating system" part. I mean, is this a concept Red Hat is actively
> marketing?
> 
> If so, as an ambassador I'd love to know it because I am constantly
> fighting against this "Fedora is a beta (or worse) level package and
> its users are just Red Hat's guinea pigs" attitude in press, blogs and
> users of other distros.
> 
> If that's not true, it would be really useful to have some words from
> a @redhat spokesperson to back a different point of view on the Red
> Hat/Fedora relationship

There's a big difference between "Fedora is a beta and users are
guinea pigs," and "Fedora is a place where *any contributor* can work
on new technical features and put them in front of millions of users
as part of a free and open source software development process."  Red
Hat is only part of our community and we've had plenty of other
contributors over the years put new software into the distribution for
people to use.

Being the proving ground for new technology that might be in a future
RHEL release is only one function of the Fedora Project.  Of course
that function is quite important to Red Hat, and a reason why Red Hat
continues to put substantail resources into Fedora.  But it's not the
only thing the Fedora Project does, and as you know lots of
contributors have their own reasons to participate as well.

Another way to think about it is like this... Any dedicated
contributor has the potential to contribute features and technology to
integrate into Fedora the distribution, just like Red Hat does.  It
just so happens that Red Hat dedicates people, time, and money to
that creation and integration effort, and as a result each release has
lots of innovative new features.  As the Fedora community (and indeed
the wider FOSS community) essentially "elects" the best stuff over
time, Red Hat can use that crowd wisdom to help decide what pieces
make the most sense for its enterprise product.  Any other contributor
can do the same thing, at whatever scale makes sense for them.

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