lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

Matthew Miller mattdm at mattdm.org
Fri Oct 20 17:29:01 UTC 2006


On Fri, Oct 20, 2006 at 09:36:15AM -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> The problem is that we are just beat. Jesse has a kid, a release
> cycle, a new knee, and a lot of other stuff on his real job. The other
> people who have been doing stuff have also had 'stuff happen', and
> temporary schedule changes that have become permanent.

Yes.

In order to survive the project needs some real support from Red Hat. (Or
some other large company who wants to do Red Hat a favor, but that seems
even less likely.) 

Using the "Chasm" marketing model [*], without Legacy, Fedora is only a
viable solution for Early Adopters and of dubious value to the second
"Pragmatist" group. However, Fedora has been enough of a success that many
Pragmatists are indeed using Fedora.

This results in large numbers of FC2, FC3, FC4 machines in production beyond
their supported lifetime. Pragmatists, by their nature, don't wanna be
upgrading all the time. Without Legacy, they're best served by CentOS and
kin. That's fine, but it's a loss for Fedora, as they're then less likely to
feed back into Extras, etc. And it's also a problem because it results in
large numbers of potentially vulnerable machines in the wild.

Fedora people repeatedly state that the distribution is great for users
beyond the tech-enthusiast Earlier Adopters. But without Legacy, it's really
not true.


* <http://www.ericsink.com/Act_Your_Age.html>


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>




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