FC2 doubtful quality?

[Sanjay Arora]

On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 17:41, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Andy Green wrote:
> 

> 
> there's a constant emphasis that fedora core is *not* red hat -- that FC 
> is a state-of-the-art, leading edge, way out there, community-based, use 
> at your own risk distro meant partially as a proving ground for new 
> technologies that will, someday, find their way into red hat's stable, 
> enterprise-level offerings.

Well, Red Hatś got to do a Microsoft, now that its begin to build its
strategy for the big league and some of the bugs of closed source are
definitely going to make their way in ;-)), like use legal MS software!!

> the point being that, regardless of what you tell people and regardless of 
> the reality, a lot of folks are going to associate fedora core with red 
> hat, and their experiences with FC are undoubtedly going to color their 
> perception of red hat.  it may not be fair, but it's going to happen.
> 
Its true. Iḿ no whiz sys-admin, but I can roll my own, if provided the
raw materials and pointers from outside. I started using linux about
four-five years ago and have never used any distro but redhat and Iḿ
currently running RH9. I started a similar thread a few days ago and
getting some suggestions as to alternatives.

Community support was what built Redhat but now stopping support of
earlier distros and trying to get users to ES by saying fedora is
bleeding edge and therefore unstable is unfair. RH could have said RH9
or other releases can upgrade to FC1 or whatever, which is stable and
will be supported and FC2 etc. are experimental but again supported.

No sys-admin in any company is going to work his butt off the chair by
using FC2 or even FC1 in a production environment, if his boss is
telling its unsupported and heśis responsible for the upgrade if he
screws up.

The issue here is not what is stable or not...issue is what the users
should upgrade to, if they can or wont pay $$ to the next MS...no
dis-respect to RH or MS meant ;-))

You know it feels like a child is being disowned by a parent ;-) On the
other hand, here in India, where bandwidth is in short supply, many
people depend upon magazine CDs for their distributions. One of the
major magazines www.pcquest.com which distributs about 25000 copies (if
I remember correctly), every-time a release comes and updates every
months, has gone on record stating in the last issue that there may not
be a RH based distro next time and their decision-makers are arguing
each other about going for their favourite distro next...Suse vs
Slackware etc.

Such major moves by people who virtually created Linux presence among
Indian public (and I am referring to power users, not sys-admins), are
changing Redhat perception here.

In fact, I met someone who sells pirated CDs here, hawking a copy of RH
ES...just like MS ;-)), stating after RH9 Fedora was unstable and heśis
selling lots of ES copies now ;-)

. 
> so the constant refrain of "if you don't like it, don't use it." is going 
> to be interpreted by some as a sign that *red hat* is not really 
> interested in their business or their satisfaction.  and this is something 
> that red hat might want to be just a wee bit concerned about.  in this 
> case, image really might be everything.

Not a wee bit concerned, I think...its already happening and I think if
Fedora is stable...i.e. bugs are looked after properly ;-) by redhat
putting more resources on Fedora, it will only build RH reputation among
the enterprise segment, where it wants a share. This kind of
attitude...even if the person is harassed by people like us, simply
because his company is not putting enough resources into its own
spin-off...will definitely put people off.

After 5 years of using RH exclusively, I am looking for alternatives
simply because of this sort of situation. I have written to four IT
magazines here stating that more distros should be put on CD so people
could try them out. I have tried my first install of SUSE 9.1 a few days
ago...I will be trying others. I don say I won´t hang on to something
that´s derived from RH9 or RH ES but I am definitely looking...and I
would not have been otherwise!

Well...thats all I have to say on this issue.

Sanjay.