At 08:04 6/17/2004, akonstam(a)trinity.edu wrote:
On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 04:12:59PM -0500, John Thompson wrote:
>
> Umm, Fedora is *NOT* a RedHat product. It is a community project
sponsored by RedHat, but it is explicitly not a product supported by RedHat.
>
Statments like this make me angry. The people who distribute fedora
work for RedHat. RedHat distributes Fedora. Fedora is a redhat product
used to test ideas that will be put in the Enterprise system.
And I have four people currently working on recycling donated old computers
to give away as charity to orphanages. If those computers break later, it's
my fault because we put in the money, time, and effort to make sure a Good
Thing was available to someone else? If we make a mistake, of course we
would try to fix it. But if we make a mistake, then you would cease to buy
my products (say, new computers) because my efforts at helping the
community (and of course myself via publicity et al.) are not perfect?
Sorry, Aaron... Just Plain Wrong [tm]. Red Hat, Inc. has a product line
consisting primarily of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They sell and support
those products. Period. End of story.
HOWEVER, Red Hat would not have a product to sell/support at all if it
weren't for the many thousands of developers in the community who produce
X, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, ncurses, iptables, and a few thousand other
packages. Red Hat depends on that community of developers to be healthy and
to make progress so their product can be better. In order to make sure that
packages they include do get better, Red Hat pays programmers to work on
many packages within Linux; this is a way to contribute back to the
community and be a good citizen while also helping yourself.
Fedora is a part of the Linux community. Red Hat specifically says "Fedora
is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc." Red Hat *is* the driving force
behind Fedora, and this is one of the ways in which they help the Linux
community while also helping themselves. But do not confuse this with "they
make it, therefore they're entirely responsible for it." Simply not true.
Cheers,
--
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz(a)simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com