On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Jesse Keating wrote:
A community project is one thing, but when what goes into the community project is dictated by marketing to ensure that the community project won't compete in any way with the "higher quality product" there seems to be problems. Requests for Opteron support, ipvs support and other such things in the community project get denied because these types of things are an "enterprise" level technology,
That is simply not true. Some of these features are not in Red Hat's repository because we haven't gotten the time to integrate them.
Nobody is stopping you from integrating these features yourself. People can point their up2date at your apt/yum repository and use the packages you are making available.
Lets face it, Red Hat is a company with finite resources and the wishlist of all Linux users together is close to infinite [1]. What is needed isn't Red Hat doubling the amount of work done, but users getting the opportunity to do part of the work themselves, together.
This model has worked very well for the development of open source programs, so I (personally) expect it to also work for a linux distribution. The success of freshrpms and fedora is certainly suggesting that the model works...
Rik van Riel [0] The more things software does "almost right", the larger the wishlist grows. Eg. when software does 10 things "almost right" and gets fixed to do all of them right, you end up with a piece of software that does 100 things "almost right" and a wish list that is 10 times as big as it used to be. Because of this I tend to view any kind of software wishlist as infinite ;)