On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 08:23:43 -0500, Wade Hampton <wadehamptoniv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > One observation and I hope Red Hat is reading this: Before RHL became > Fedora, Dell would have most likely used RHL as they already had > agreements with Red Hat for servers. Notice that the first Linux > option will most likely be SuSE and that Fedora is mentioned as a > possible later alternative, but no mention (so far) of Red Hat. 5 > years ago, Red Hat WAS Linux to many, especially PHBs. This IS market > erosion. A few years ago they would have been selling the linux boxes to a different type of customer than they may be looking at today. Fedora wouldn't make much sense. They would be better off putting RHEL on them rather than Fedora if they are going to support them. > I think the announcements by ESR further reflect this erosion in > mindshare and low-end market penetration by Red Hat. Maybe the OLPC > effort and new efforts on the part of the Fedora community will > reverse this trend but it may be too late. I am not sure that the mind share for Fedora has really dropped on the low end. A few years ago people buoght the boxed sets because downloading images and CD blanks were more expensive. There is more likely a lot more people using Fedora now than there were people using pre-Fedora versions of RH. They just get the software a different way now. It may be that other distros have grown faster than Fedora for desktop use by "normal" people. This may or may not be a problem for Fedora. The whole Dell thing doesn't make much difference to me. I buy the computers I use in parts or acquire hand me downs and I won't be buying a machine from Dell. I certainly wouldn't use any preinstalled OS of theirs, Linux or not. I trust Redhat a lot more than Dell, not to include spyware type applications on the system or misuse information obtained when getting updates from their servers.
