Fedora Linux

[Lloyd D Budd]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 22:01, cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:

> Fedora will only _survive_ (and by that, I mean "not disappear as an
> abject failure") if RHAT devotes serious resources to it; as serious as
> they have been devoting to "Red Hat Linux."

I disagree, but time will tell ;-)  It will fail if RH is not available
to the community, and if they try to push sales by ?continuing? to make
their "Enterprise Linux" offerings source "obscure", and it is possibly
concerning that the Fedora product website is hosted on RH's domain --
ie hopefully the community will be able to largely control what is
posted.

> If, instead, they depend on community contributions to replace their
> efforts, then this requires that other people be convinced to donate the
> assistance that RHAT has clearly demonstrated, by the fact of their
> establishing this new distribution, they DON'T wish to give.
I disagree here too, Fedora predates RHs decision.  It was becoming a
successful project http://www.fedora.us/


> For there to be any kind of success, a community has to _quickly_
> flourish around it, with a LOT of people joining in to manage one
> package or another, and they'll have to go through the growing and
> learning pains that the Debian project has already gone through in
> establishing exactly that sort of distributed network of package
> managers.
> 
> And there also lies another challenge; why should someone experiment
> with contributing to Fedora which might fall as quickly as it rises when
> they could join an already-strong network of Debian packagers?  Fedora
> needs to draw from that same set of people.

Debian is still too hard for many.  I think this move may be a good
thing for Mandrake -- though Mandrake felt "French" to me.

I found 
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7169
quite interesting, but if it is as the author suggests then I fear an
outcome as you predict.  The best thing that Fedora could do is for the
core to stay snuggled up to the RH releases.  This homogeneity would
encourage the most likely users of Fedora to contribute to the
community.  

I wonder how much resources RH currently "wastes" on the desktop
product? -- by that I mean that too many groups are trying for a piece
of that pie. Also most people suggest where many is (easiest?) to be
made on the core Linux, is in support -- and communities are too good at
providing free support ;-)  If RH chooses / is able to focus more
resources on their server products, it may mean very good things for
Redhat and Linux.

Cheers,
Lloyd

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