On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 04:12:59PM -0500, John Thompson wrote:
>
> Umm, Fedora is *NOT* a RedHat product. It is a community project sponsored by RedHat, but it is explicitly not a product supported by RedHat.
>
Statments like this make me angry. The people who distribute fedora
work for RedHat. RedHat distributes Fedora. Fedora is a redhat product
used to test ideas that will be put in the Enterprise system.
And I have four people currently working on recycling donated old computers to give away as charity to orphanages. If those computers break later, it's my fault because we put in the money, time, and effort to make sure a Good Thing was available to someone else? If we make a mistake, of course we would try to fix it. But if we make a mistake, then you would cease to buy my products (say, new computers) because my efforts at helping the community (and of course myself via publicity et al.) are not perfect?
Sorry, Aaron... Just Plain Wrong [tm]. Red Hat, Inc. has a product line consisting primarily of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They sell and support those products. Period. End of story.
HOWEVER, Red Hat would not have a product to sell/support at all if it weren't for the many thousands of developers in the community who produce X, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, ncurses, iptables, and a few thousand other packages. Red Hat depends on that community of developers to be healthy and to make progress so their product can be better. In order to make sure that packages they include do get better, Red Hat pays programmers to work on many packages within Linux; this is a way to contribute back to the community and be a good citizen while also helping yourself.
Fedora is a part of the Linux community. Red Hat specifically says "Fedora is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc." Red Hat *is* the driving force behind Fedora, and this is one of the ways in which they help the Linux community while also helping themselves. But do not confuse this with "they make it, therefore they're entirely responsible for it." Simply not true.
Cheers,
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
