[Ilugc] How far we are going to Compromise ?
- From: sundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rahul)
- Date: Tue Aug 22 10:51:07 2006
Hassan wrote:
Well I don't understand what is being implied by "Going back to a
product line that didnt work out well is not patriotism" ?
Dropping a product or creating new products has absolutely nothing to do
with patriotism in any organization. So lets cut the drama and
concentrate on the facts.
Do you mean
Redhat 8.0 & 9.0 didn't rock - well I was under the impression that
these two were the prime reasons why Redhat gained media glare in the
first place.
The product line was absolutely good. It just didnt work well as a
business. Good products are not always good business. There are multiple
reasons for that in the case of Red Hat Linux. One of them is that the
retail world simply doesnt not respond well to releases every six
months. End users would see Red Hat Linux 6.0 boxes on the shelfs long
after RedHat Linux 8 was released, buy it out for say 40 dollars and
call up Red Hat for support. Since the customer brought the product
thats natural however that particular version had a lifecyle of usually
an year and would have long since been EOL'ed leaving everyone frustrated.
There is also the fact that selling Free software on CD's works only
when users dont have access to broad band connections which was
increasingly not the case world over. (FSF made relatively good business
long back selling emacs on CD's for example).
Fedora is again on a six month release cycle and a year or more worth of
updates for every release however it side steps the "retail model"
problem for Red Hat since Red Hat just let local vendors directly
download redistribute it. It also lets contributors external to Red Hat
participate and drive the development of a distribution in various ways
beyond just reporting bugs.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux isnt a retail product either. It is a
subscription. You register, pay and download or get it from local vendors.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Secondly, "Going back" ?
I meant going back to a retail model. Like I said both Fedora Core and
Red Hat Enterprise Linux are not off the shelf products and it doesnt
depend on retail vendors to play catch up to latest versions available
solving that problem in different ways for both the consumer and the
vendor.
So you do
accept that redhat didn't give the necessary attention to FC ? And the
very idea of splitting FC from the redhat EL shows that.
Fedora Core has a very similar set of engineers within Red Hat to
product it as much as Red Hat Linux did. It is just developed in a more
open fashion with community contributors. Like I said bandwidth alone
for the project costs Red Hat a couple of million dollars every year and
more resources are being spend every day. So I cant see where there is a
lack of "attention".
As for the reasons for the split and various other details, see the
general overview by me at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Presentations
Redhat shot itself in its foot by not capitalizing on the desktop
version of RH. They could have with some effort made it a worthy
competitor to windows (in terms of usability to the average user).
A few mails back you were arguing that trying to work on the desktop
market is eating other people's pie, there was money to be made on the
desktop and vendors should focus just on the servers. Anyway there is
both client and server side products from Red Hat. Things will get
better one step at a time.
As
for the concept of patriotism, I guess thats what they are trying to do
now...
Again there is no question of patriotism anywhere in this discussion.
Now that Ubuntu has become the popular desktop distro and people
(sys admins & biz decision makers) are starting to consider Ubuntu for
corporate use as well.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/editorial_13
Editorial with a lot of hyperbole about how the sky is falling.
Everybody could write one.
However it is amazing to see such support for RH in this forum. I won't
loose hope - maybe with the sheer support of guys like you FC might
become a quality desktop distro. Hoping for the best.
Rahul
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