Who's the Fedora user?

[Stuart Ellis]

On Wed, 24 Aug 2005 12:06:01 -0400, "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com>
said:
> On 8/24/05, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> > What do we have to say to her?
> 
> Honestly.. I'll tell her that perhaps linux is not right for her...
> and to check out other for-pay linux distributions which include
> proprietary technology instead of being completely open source. Moving
> to completely open source solutions has an opportunity cost, you
> either value the benefits of open source over the costs or you
> don't... and that determination comes down to personal situations. 
> I'd also tell her that crossing any operating system boundary has a
> portability price associated with. The price is higher when you
> crossing from proprietary to an open vendor. And while there are some
> technical solution which help.. there is no universal solution to the
> problem..either for proprietary binary portability or proprietary
> content portability.

I think this is a model worth looking at - CodeWeavers' "Truth in
Advertising: Real Dirt":

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/truth_in_advertising/the_real_dirt/

They say straight out in a simple language "What works well" *and* "What
sort of works" and "What doesn't work"

As Jeff says, we can't provide binary compatibility. Maybe we can make a
plus point of being absolutely straight about these kinds of things and
differentiating Fedora from those who say "Linux is ready for the
desktop", without talking about the trade-offs that users must make.


--

Stuart Ellis

stuart at elsn.org

Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/

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