On Thu, 17 May 2007, Ian Murdock wrote:
I see Fedora as a missed opportunity (for RH). They had the volume market (with Red Hat Linux), and they abandoned it. They created Fedora to fill the void, largely because they didn't want Debian coming in and nibbling away at them from below, but that clearly didn't work (one word: Ubuntu).
They create Fedora to fill the void after creating RHES. I think it was apparent that they needed more meat to move into the enterprise, and they didn't want to loose the bottom end where they grew from, so created Fedora. The reason Ubuntu was a success, to me, is that it was able to put an elegant install and UI on front of Debian. They were more successful than Progeny.:-/ Corel tried to use Debian before also, failed.
When I worked at VA Linux Systems, the rule of thumb was that if you could get Debian installed, it was the preferred distro, but all others used Red Hat as it was much easier for the average person to install.
Sure, Fedora is a great QA vehicle for Red Hat, but what about the hordes of people who are putting Fedora into production (and, yes, there are a lot of them--this is a different group of people than the group Solaris targets today).
But this is the same group of people that OpenSolaris would target. There is not much difference. Most enterprise will pony up with RHES, just like they would want to run Solaris.
What happens when a handful of developers builds a web application on Fedora, puts it out in the wild, and ends up with the hottest thing on the web?
I see it evolving and making it's way back into the code base, which would possibly make it back into RHES at some point, should be be worthy.
How do they avoid the Friendster problem--death by success?
Could you elaborate on this more, I don't think I understand what you're describing.
Bottom line: With Fedora, there's no way to do that--Fedora and RHEL are two different products, so there's no way to leverage the network effects. Worse (for RH), they've created a competitor--yes, Red Hat's biggest competitor is not Novell, it's Fedora. That smells like opportunity to me.
I see them as having more market with both than when they were Red Hat Linux. It was a way for them to grow their market, to push into the enterprise but retain the grass roots which open source thrives on.
What's wrong with revenue streams? Solaris and OpenSolaris appeal to two very different audiences. We have a product for one audience today but not for the other, and we need to fix that.
The problem is that management will start to cut projects, dictate futures, and start to be a gauge on the work, based on revenue.
Ultimately, I'd like to see Sun start charging for Solaris use, in the same way Red Hat charges for RHES use. Solaris belongs to Sun.
OpenSolaris should belong to the community, the community should decide it's destiny, the community should be the sum of the entire community. Yes, Sun is a part of that, but it is only a part. It's not up to Sun to determine the destiny, IMO, and once revenue streams are attached to OpenSolaris, there seems more chance of that happening. Bottom line is that Sun needs to be careful with it's power, because it's not the only entity in the community.
-- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 IHV/OEM Group _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
