On 19/02/2013 13:33, jonc wrote:
On 02/19/2013 07:01 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
And now you touch upon another important issue. This is more of a
distro maintenance issue. It is also probably why Ubuntu maintainers
pay more attention to such things - because their users are their
_customers_. Without those, there's no revenue.
Well, there's something I can agree with. Ubuntu sells services much
like Red Hat, and tries to do deals with hardware OEM's. So, they have
paying customers. *That's* the kind of constraining influence on
developers that does not exist in the free-as-in-beer world of Fedora
and most everywhere else in FOSS.
The majority of FOSS code is contributed by people who do so on the
payroll of large companies. Free-as-in-beer isn't - it's just that
somebody else is paying for it. And those that are paying for it should
probably be paying more attention in some instances.
Being dependent on customer revenue encumbers developers with the need
to keep those customers happy. It limits their freedom. You wouldn't
kill Gnome 2 if your income relied on its existence.
Encumbering developers with a dose of reality is not a bad thing. I
speak from the best part of 20 years' experience as a software developer.
Fedora doesn't really need to worry about having happy users as long as
it has enough users to shake out its software. Red Hat, though, is a
business, with stockholders. They have considerably less freedom to do
as they please.
Yet they are constrained by whatever filters down from Fedora. By the
time it gets to the point of rolling a new EL release, it'd take too
much resources to reverse the course set in Fedora.
Gordan
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