lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 24 October 2006 10:23, Mike McCarty wrote:
>Matthew Miller wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>> 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.
>
>I'm not familiar with that, but I'll look into it. I agree with your
>statement.
>
I couldn't say it any better either.

>> 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.
>
>You have struck a very large nail upon the head with perfect
>orthogonality. I'm using FC2 here.

Ditto, albeit with lots of stuff installed from tarballs because so much of 
FC2 was considerably more broken.  IMO to release that without any kde 
testing should have been a no-no.  As it was, just waving the mouse over a 
printing function in a kde menu brought the box down.  Thats NOT good PR 
for fedora.
 
>> 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.
>
>Indeed. This is a statement which I have made on several occasions, only
>to be hooted down.

Well, in my case I picked a distro that spoke english, then fixed what 
needed to be fixed.  That wasn't as easy as it should have been when one 
can't stand the gnome's constant nagging about being root, dammit its my 
machine, why the heck should I put another million miles on my mouse 
getting rid of nag windows cause I'm root!  That meant that cups, gimp, 
imagemajik, kino, qt and kde all got installed outside the rpm box from 
tarballs that FC2 would never backport even though what they had was 
broken.

Now kino has died due to kernel changes (currently running 2.6.19-rc3), so 
the next vcd I make will be on my lappies teeny little 60GB partition for 
linux.  Or on this box after I put FC6||kubuntu on it.

Would the world be worse off if fedora died?  Obviously yes, even for the 
pragmatists.  We all bet on our favorite horse you know.

>Mike

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.