[fab] fedora slashdot interview

Rahul sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Wed Aug 2 18:59:17 UTC 2006


David Barzilay wrote:
> Nice move, Max.
> 
> We can never stop online hoaxes or misinformed articles, so I also 
> believe we should always opt for the clarifying method.
> 
> People speculate a bunch, we explain whassup, then judgement is up to 
> the readers ;)
> 
> Now my question: do you intend to go against the assumption that Red Hat 
> "neglected its Fedora desktop users"?

Better to wait for the questions to be asked before speculating. I doubt 
any question would be phrased that way. Fedora is not even in the 
picture when Red Hat supposedly abandoned the desktop since people 
equated the retail model with desktop usage and Fedora is not a retail 
commercially supported product.

Having said that, the number of new efforts that Red Hat or people in 
Red Hat has created (and continue to work on) around the desktop 
(freedesktop.org, hal, dbus, Network Manager, GTK, Large amount of GNOME 
etc is good enough a proof that Red Hat is willing to invest very 
heavily in the desktop.

There is a question of better integration in existing products that goes 
beyond Red Hat's upstream project involvement though. Random examples of 
this are Network Manager being shipped enabled by default in various 
other distributions while Fedora does not. Dogtail just got into Fedora 
development tree yesterday. Sabayon is in Fedora Extras still.

Red Hat's launch of purely desktop (and laptop) focused commercial 
products if any is ever done depend on solid business value. We will get 
to that point soon I hope.

Rahul






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