On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 08:29:30AM +0200, Gianluca Sforna wrote: > On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > But I think we all agree the linked article is really bad written and it > > would he useful to "help" those news sources to improve their reporting. > > In addition, I'd love to hear some sort of official word about the > "Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that > eventually end up in the firm's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) > operating system" part. I mean, is this a concept Red Hat is actively > marketing? > > If so, as an ambassador I'd love to know it because I am constantly > fighting against this "Fedora is a beta (or worse) level package and > its users are just Red Hat's guinea pigs" attitude in press, blogs and > users of other distros. > > If that's not true, it would be really useful to have some words from > a @redhat spokesperson to back a different point of view on the Red > Hat/Fedora relationship There's a big difference between "Fedora is a beta and users are guinea pigs," and "Fedora is a place where *any contributor* can work on new technical features and put them in front of millions of users as part of a free and open source software development process." Red Hat is only part of our community and we've had plenty of other contributors over the years put new software into the distribution for people to use. Being the proving ground for new technology that might be in a future RHEL release is only one function of the Fedora Project. Of course that function is quite important to Red Hat, and a reason why Red Hat continues to put substantail resources into Fedora. But it's not the only thing the Fedora Project does, and as you know lots of contributors have their own reasons to participate as well. Another way to think about it is like this... Any dedicated contributor has the potential to contribute features and technology to integrate into Fedora the distribution, just like Red Hat does. It just so happens that Red Hat dedicates people, time, and money to that creation and integration effort, and as a result each release has lots of innovative new features. As the Fedora community (and indeed the wider FOSS community) essentially "elects" the best stuff over time, Red Hat can use that crowd wisdom to help decide what pieces make the most sense for its enterprise product. Any other contributor can do the same thing, at whatever scale makes sense for them. -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com -- marketing mailing list marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
