On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
New, untested things have to appear first somewhere. What do you think would
be more effective?
I kind of like the vibrancy of the Ubuntu community: People have new ideas
and they spinoff 'Edubuntu', 'Nubuntu', 'Ubuntu CE', 'Kubuntu', 'Xubuntu',
and so on. Good ideas spread and come back. Classic 'Bazaar' to Fedora's
'Cathedral'. You don't see a lot of 'spinoff' from Fedora because Redhat
has clutched it too close to themselves. If you have a strong enough base
community and loose enough control, experimentation happens automatically.
Ubuntu sounds good, but keep in mind that they don't have much actual
experience or a track record in either long term support or rolling out
updates painlessly across versions with big changes.
Granted. And I expect some major bobbles in their future. One or two won't
kill them, a steady stream of problems would.
Does the number of fedora users that aren't going to report bugs matters to
anyone?
Emphatically: Yes!
Developers and testers are *part* of an eco-system which is ultimately
based on and dependant on end users. End users will always heavily
out-number developers and testers, and they _should_.
Only a tiny percentage of the end users will act as testers. Only a small
percentage of those will contribute code or fixes. But without the end
users _you don't get the testers or developer, either_. If 1% of users
submit bug reports, and 0.01% of users contribute code (pulling all of
these numbers from thin air - I honestly believe the real numbers are
_lower_ based on my own software releases over the years), then you need a
LOT of end users to maintain and develop a distribution.
What you _as a developer_ want are bug reports and fixes. But you aren't
going to get them unless you have enough end users to form the eco-system
that testers and developers spring from. To expect otherwise is to think
that you can raise a crop without the field below it.
What do masses of silent end users bring to the table? Only *everything else*.
There is RHEL if you need and can afford support and CentOS if you
don't/can't. A CentOS user is just as much or more a potential future RHEL
customer as a fedora user - and RH doesn't get paid any more if use fedora.
They need people who use and test the added features, but what do they gain
by doing the extra work of backporting fixes into yet another old version.
A large eco-system from which test reporters, bug fixes, developers and new ideas spring.
--
Benjamin Franz
"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
for a prediction and keeping track of oneâ??s past record of accuracy."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
