Is Fedora *really* Free?

[Arthur Pemberton]

On 10/15/06, Keith G. Robertson-Turner
<fedora-gmane.00003 at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk> wrote:
[ snip ]

The article you linked to is FUD which has already been disputed
publically on via the Fedora Annoucement list.

> The implication (from the article) is that unless the Fedora project
> can start providing metrics to Red Hat, then the project is in danger
> of losing funding, and hence be discontinued.


Despite the fact that the article was mostly flaimbait, are you're
saying that this not make sense? Fedora is Free to us the users, not
to Redhat. They need to spend their money wisely, else they can't pay
for all the servers, developers, and bandwidth Fedora consumes.
Regardless of how much community involvement there is, Fedora uses a
great deal of resources, the bill for which RedHat has been footing
all these years. I think it is perfectly reasonable that they have
some metric by which to measure usage of Fedora. What's the point of
funding Fedora if only 50 people use it? A project of this size cannot
be free to everyone, it may be free to us the users and volunteer
helpers (poackages, devs, etc) but I'm pretty sure the accountants
over at RedHat can testify that it isn't free to RedHat.

-- 
Fedora Core 5 and proud