[Fedora-marketing-list] RH making fun of us ?

[Rahul]

Thomas Canniot wrote:
> Did I miss something, or RH CTO has problem with Fedora first Myth ?
> 
> http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/news/2006/08/25/195490.htm?p=ica
> 
> "We're convinced that there is a better way to develop software, so what
> we did is we blew up the notion of an Alpha and we use Fedora as an
> alpha."
> 

Followed by

"The engineers are goaled on not just producing enterprise quality 
software, but driving it through upstream in terms of the community.

In the early days it was about providing a version of Linux that is 
differentiated somehow; instead it's now about how do we participate in 
the upstream projects through Fedora.
"

I send this over to Max Spevack  and we had a discussion with Brian 
Stevens and others in the Fedora Board about this already. I think what 
is being said is very much right but the choice of terminology in the 
middle is obsoletely bad.

However it's always a good idea to read things in context. For one, this 
was a live interview and the question was "where is the alpha for 
RHEL?". From the perspective of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development 
there is no alpha release for it since Red Hat has been investing its 
efforts into driving changes upstream through Fedora instead.

I would read encourage everyone to read the full interview instead of 
choice quotes.


> What about Spevack 8th question in his interview on /.?
> 
> Where do we stand ?

Exactly where we have stood for a long time now.

> 
> What to say to people now ?

As I already said in http://rahulsundaram.livejournal.com/6407.html, 
alpha and beta releases are "bad" choice of words because they convey 
more than one thing.

 From a perspective of ongoing development, Brian Stevens is right but 
they also have some amount of negative tones associated with them due to 
perceived impact on the quality or robustness of what Fedora itself is.

> One thing : thanks a lot.
> 

It was no fun for everyone involved. We will to have collecting work on 
  saying things without the negativity. Apologies if you that put you in 
a tight ring.

Rahul