Fedora philosophy (was ATI video comes out of the closet)

[Les Mikesell]

Dave Ihnat wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 09, 2007 at 10:12:57AM -0500, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> Apparently it isn't either a major goal or that they think the subset of
>> users who might become sysadmins is heavily weighted towards people who
>> like a fast moving distro such as Fedora. Or perhaps they feel a distro such
>> as what you suggest would cut into their sales of Redhat support.
> 
> You've hit the nail on the head, and also summarized in a few words
> what so distressed many of us when RedHat made the move to Fedora.
> Essentially, they moved from providing a free RedHat distribution that
> actually *was* usable in a production environment, and thus provided
> real utility to the general user community, to providing a bleeding-edge
> moving target.  You can try to use it if you wish, of course; but you've
> little (if any) guarantee that normal updates won't break it, and you
> are assured that you MUST carry out a major version upgrade within a year.
> 
> RedHat gets the benefit of our testing and suggestions, but that
> gets folded into the commercial version of RHE.  Essentially, Fedora
> switched from being of essential value to the user community as a free
> distribution to being of essential value to RedHat.  We get to somewhat
> affect where their commercial distros go, and if we incidentally get some
> egoboo or even utility out of the Fedora distribution, well, good on us;
> but that's not RedHat's concern.
> 
> "Das ding an sich"; Fedora is what it is.  Take it or leave it.

Which, I suppose, made the Ubuntu distribution or something like it 
inevitable as most people have little use for a software testbed and 
predictably decide not to take fedora.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com