On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 03:02:08PM -0500, Mike McGrath wrote: > One, simple question that may not have an answer. > > > What is our target market supposed to be? You probably need to answer first what the purpose of Fedora is and then you'll find the target audience. There are two major stakeholders, Red Hat and the community. Red Hat wants to have a Linux distribution that * acts a healthy upstream project for RHEL, therefore * matures technology fast enough * sets "Linux standards" * educates users to be able to seaminglessly transition to a RHEL model once their need is there * has a large market share in the distribution jungle, therefore * needs to cater for non-direct target audiences like multimedia or non-technical pros. * has many developers, not only RH paid, but also streams in man power from the community * doesn't cut a market share out of RHEL and thus hurts RH business The community is interested in * a vivid Linux distribution that they may substantially shape * usually latest technology * stablity, but not as important as latest and greatest * plethora of choices (e.g. many packages) This symbiosis leads to a very mixed target audience from technology experts testing beta upstream software to multimedia fans and granpa George writing his emails. It's probably easier to define what the traget groups are not: these are the ones reserved for RHEL, e.g. business customers and long time support seeking groups (e.g. stable APIs/ABIs over many years). But even these are indirectly targeted since Fedora as an upstream for RHEL would never create an uncomfortable situation for the RHEL target groups. So at the end you'll find that everyone has become part of Fedora's target group in one way or another. The reverse question is: Why are you asking this? Probably in order to decide something according to the target audience. In which case none of the above is helpful. -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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