Over the last few days there seems to be a bit of existential angst about Fedora. So here are my random thoughts. About Fedora disappearing if Red Hat is bought by some evil corporation, for example Microsoft. :-) I am not worried. As it has been pointed out, all the Fedora packages as well as infrastructure are open source so they would not be lost. Undoubtedly people that have contributed to Fedora over the years, and have thereby developed affection for the distro as well as online relationships with other people in Fedora, would feel a sense of loss. That is normal. But that would not be the end of the world as we know it. Either a new distro would arise out of the ashes, or people could start contributing to an existing distro, and there are hundreds of them out there. About Fedora losing users, or not growing. I don't think we can go by anecdotal evidence. We need reliable statistics, but I don't think they exist now, and I doubt they will exist in the next five years, if ever. For example, I have Fedora, Windows, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, etc, on my multi-boot PC. So how would I show up in statistics? Other people might run two OSes simultaneously with virtualization, so the same statistical problem occurs. And there could be a server tucked away in the corner of a server room running FTP. Does such a server count as a user? So IMO instead of having a numerical target for users (which as I pointed out we cannot measure) Fedora should focus on its current stakeholders: Red Hat obviously, because it is the main single contributor and pays the bills, and the rest of the community, such as the people that manage, package, test and participate in the mailing lists and forums. I have been using Linux for only a year, and Fedora since last December, so my experience is quite limited. I think Fedora is fine the way it is, there is however a couple of things that do not thrill me. First the name of the distro: Fedora. It completely turns me off, and that is one of the reasons why Fedora was not the first distro I tried. Part of the reason is the sound of the world, which evokes an unpleasant association in my mother language. Then the logo does not appeal to me either. If you look at Ubuntu, they came up with a logo that reflects the name of the distro. For a while they had pictures of people in circles holding hands and so on. This is good marketing. Fedora is a hat. As far as I know Fedora is not allowed to use a hat in its logo to prevent the Fedora brand to get mixed up with Red Hat's. Fair enough. But this means that marketing becomes more complicated due to lack of brand consistency. The problem could be solved by changing the name of the distro, but this would incur large costs, not only to Red Hat but also to its contributors that for example pay for websites that have Fedora in the name, so it is not practical. The solution was an abstract logo (the stylized f) which is not as powerful. I am not a graphical designer, still I would venture that it would be possible to come up with a nicer looking abstract logo. Then there are colours. Look at Ubuntu 10.04. I think they came up with bold original colours that mix well together. This is not an easy feat. On the other hand Fedora colours completely turn me off. This does not bother me personally, because I can customize the Gnome desktop and have a nice image for Grub background, so I only see Fedora colours in Plymouth, and that is because I have not had the time to see if I can customize those. You might say that colours are not important, substance is what matters. And that is true to some extent. However a nice appearance helps to attract new users to a distro. I think Ubuntu is more in tune with the zeitgeist and that may be why it appears to have more users. Someone remarked that Fedora is not popular among university students. This is a group that it would be good to try to attract. Now I am not an university student, but my guess is many of them, at least in the west, like Lady Gaga. She is not a great singer, she is popular mainly for bold visuals. This to prove my point that looks sell. A disclaimer: I am not keen on pop, I like classical music! In a nutshell: IMO Fedora is fine, except that it should come up with a better logo, typeface and colours, something with an edge! -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
