RedHat, Fedora future?

[Robert Marcano]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 17:42, Tim Kossack wrote:
> Am Do, den 05.02.2004 schrieb Robert Marcano um 20:20:

<snip....>

> > 
> > I feel that the RedHat products are based on "polished" GNOME desktops.
> > Maybe you are talking about proprietary MP3 plugins, proprietary media
> > players, proprietary windows emulation layers, etc. that the other
> > companies includes in their offerings, in my opinion that doesn't make a
> > "polished" OSS based desktop, it makes a proprietary OS, something that
> > I am trying to avoid ;-)
> 
> i don't just mean plug-ins, but also the general effort red hat puts
> into their desktop (as well as server) offering(s) compared to the
> competition trying to make the life of the user and the admin easier.
> you can of course rest on the idealistic standpoint, that
> non-oss/proprietary are per se evil, but let's face it

I don't think that proprietary software is pure evil, where I work we
use proprietary software without any ideological conflict, for example
IBM DB2, because they provide what OSS does not provides (yet), I think
that less than 2 percent of our users need flash, an mp3 player, video
player, neither internet access to do their daily work. This 2% can use
the distro that suits their need, or a Mac, or Windows (why not) 

>  - there are
> certain standards which you have to take into account, and without java,
> flash, mp3, video etc. i consider even an os for the corporate desktop
> not up to the task. companies are after a fully-featured replacement for
> windows which includes all these things or at least makes it easy to get
> them from a user's perspective. as far as any linux-distro shipping
> without those, that's certainly not the case. that's why suse, sun,
> lindows are shipping their desktop offerings with at least part of this
> stuff already included (if red hat prof. ws includes these things, i
> stand partly corrected).
> to sum it up - red hat's current desktop offerings are basically their
> enterprise server putted in a differently labeled box, and i wouldn't
> exactly call that a viable desktop (strategy). 

One of the things that i like about the existence of many different
Linux distros is that i can choose the distro that meet my expectations,
I personally don't want all the Linux distributions transformed on
multipurpose desktop environments. I think that RedHat desktop solutions
are targeting the IT professional (you can see their offer of discounted
training at http://www.redhat.com/mktg/rhpw/ : "$250 off Red Hat
training coupon") and Enterprise systems, that is what i want and need
(and I'm not alone), people that don't match this criteria, must use the
distro that really makes sense to use, call it Lindows, Gentoo,
Mandrake, etc.

> i'm not bashing, but simply stating the facts. with the competiton being
> ahead in that respect, let's see what happens...

Maybe they are ahead for personal use, and it is fine to me because I am
from an old school that says that specialization is the best thing that
can happen to any hardware or software product, for example, I don't see
Sony selling Big x86 servers and people telling them that they are
leaving an important market because they are only selling personal
computers

Just my opinion ;-)

Robert Marcano