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@xxxxxxxxx
