On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 21:15 -0500, Jon Stanley wrote: > So I'm on both sides of the fence - Fedora contributor and RHEL > customer (as I suspect that many of us are). And the question does > come up a lot, so here's my "stock response": > > Fedora's goal is to be the best of what works today. RHEL's goal is > to be the best of what works and is supportable for the next 7 years. > These are fundamentally incompatible goals, which cannot be served by > one distribution. > > Fedora accomplishes it's goal by being a completely open and > transparent R&D lab, for both Red Hat and members of the community. > Anyone, whether you're working on Fedora in your spare time (as I do), > or if you have a mandate from your manager at Red Ha because they'd > like to see a particular feature in the next version of RHEL, can get > a feature into Fedora by following the same process. Let me make some > cases in point, using some features from Fedora 10. > > First, from the community side, Hans de Goede (now a Red Hat employee, > but that's really irrelevant - he wasn't when he started work on the > feature and is employed doing something completely different), decided > that we needed better webcam support in Fedora. He defined the > problem space, worked to implement the drivers required in the > upstream kernel, and packaged a library to provide v4l2 access to v4l1 > apps (sorry for the technical details there). > > >From the Red Hat "features we'd like to see in RHEL" side (note that > this is speculation as to the motivation for this feature, but pretty > educated speculation), libvirt (which is the hypervisor-agnostic > virtualization mangement layer in Fedora/RHEL) can now remotely > provision storage and perform remote installations. These features > were again implemented upstream (even though we are upstream for > libvirt), thus making the improvements available for any consumer of > libvirt, Fedora included, packaged in Fedora, put through a test plan, > and accepted. > > If it really were a fact that "Fedora is a perpetual beta of RHEL" > were true, two things would not be true: > > 1) The first feature would not be in Fedora, it provides very little > "enterprise" value (however does provide a lot of value in that we now > have a wider range of hardware that Just Works(TM) ). > > 2) I would not be a member of the Fedora Engineering Steering > Committee (FESCo) which decides on the technical direction of Fedora > and is in charge of the feature process. > > I'm sorry that this has been long, but I really think that this is a > really important topic, and we (Fedora Marketing) need to find a way > to spread this sort of messaging. +1 The best among the answers I have seen/read .... I have written this on my blog : http://satish.playdrupal.com/?q=what_is_fedora let me know if there is a better place to write this on (may be LWN) or please digg this : http://digg.com/linux_unix/What_is_FEDORA Thanks Satish -- http://satish.playdrupal.com -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
