Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi,
I was talking recently to a couple of friends who aren't in the software
industry and it came out in our recent discussions that both the
companies they are working for is using Fedora on their systems. They
remarked that they had no idea that Red Hat was involved in Fedora.
I still meet people in various places who think Red Hat has stopped
working on a free distribution after Red Hat Linux 9 and continue to use
it or worse a earlier version.
People don't know about Linux. People don't know (or don't care) about
Free and Open Source Software in general. Or open document standards for
that matter. Even more people do not know EPEL. I've seen experienced
administrators not knowing perl-LDAP is actually a package and it
doesn't need to come from CPAN.
Long story short; people just can't keep track. Some people will miss
out on huge changes. Ask people to explain global warming. Ignorance is
bliss. And not our problem.
I just looked within Fedora to see if there was any hint and couldn't
really find any prominent ones. The note on http://fedoraproject.org is
also easily missed. Is this a deliberate decision? Should there be some
of co-branding within the distribution and a prominent hint in other
places?
Something like Fedora - Powered by Red Hat/ Sponsored by Red Hat or some
such.
A *huge* -1 here
We've already spend lots of effort getting rid of the widely spread
prejudice of being Red Hat's pre-enterprise private little playground
project or distribution, and explaining that we're actually a community
powered project instead (Yes, sponsored by Red Hat. Yes, upstream to Red
Hat's Enterprise Linux product *and proud of it, might I add*).
I'm not even sure we actually did get rid of that prejudice entirely. It
may still exist in some people's heads.
Anyway, correctly and fully exposing how Fedora is related to Red Hat,
and how that works for both the community and Red Hat, with mere mortals
on the one side, and business customers on the other, is way more
important then getting the long-term users back on board because they
missed out on Red Hat renaming the free/gratis distribution to Fedora,
making Red Hat their Enterprise product.
Honestly, I don't think it's our problem someone missed out on all this
back in the day. If they're really interested / valuable as
contributors, it'll come naturally. If not, it'll still come naturally
with the work of our Ambassadors and thanks to other exposure.
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip
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