On Sunday 09 November 2003 09:54 am, Jack Coates wrote: > That's good strategy in the proprietary world, but the open source > community around both distributions has to buy into the idea for it to > work in this case.
Well, it is new but I think that once the community realizes that RH is continuing to support Open Source and continuing to make an investment in Fedora, they will come to accept the differentiation. If you look at it as a way to clearly separate the desktop product from the server product, it begins to be seen as mostly a marketing move. In some ways, this may also help them combat the FUD from MS. With less frequent software updates and longer testing periods before new releases of RH, they will show a more low-key track record of security vulnerabilities and patches than they might if they were more cutting edge like Fedora. For those of us who understand IT, we know that frequency of patches is not necessarily an indicator of low quality, in many cases, it can be an indicator of high quality as the number of testers and developers patch things before they even become known issues. However, MS appears to be ready to use desktop numbers to recommend against certain Linux distributions, so this may just be a way for RH to combat that type of activity. > How long before "scratch-an-itch" leads to Fedora > being a pretty good server platform? It may already be a "pretty good" server platform. I guess the main question then becomes, how many companies want to rely on a "pretty good" server platform for their enterprise production level systems that will cause them to actually lose money if they go down. Red Hat has never compared well in the desktop market because of their reputation as having less cutting edge packages, less consumer hardware support, etc. This whole thing may just be a case of RH wanting people to compare apples to apples. I have always liked Mandrake more than RedHat because it does have more cutting edge software that I liked, at the price of some bugs that I could either work around or figure out how to fix myself. However, I am not running an enterprise wide banking system on it either. If I were, I might consider the ramifications of frequent software updates, less dedicated testing, and more unknown quantities in the mix. -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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