Co-branding?

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was talking recently to a couple of friends who aren't in the software 
> industry and it came out in our recent discussions that both the 
> companies they are working for is using Fedora on their systems. They 
> remarked that they had no idea that Red Hat was involved in Fedora.
> 
> I still meet people in various places who think Red Hat has stopped 
> working on a free distribution after Red Hat Linux 9 and continue to use 
> it or worse a earlier version.
> 

People don't know about Linux. People don't know (or don't care) about 
Free and Open Source Software in general. Or open document standards for 
that matter. Even more people do not know EPEL. I've seen experienced 
administrators not knowing perl-LDAP is actually a package and it 
doesn't need to come from CPAN.

Long story short; people just can't keep track. Some people will miss 
out on huge changes. Ask people to explain global warming. Ignorance is 
bliss. And not our problem.

> I just looked within Fedora to see if there was any hint and couldn't 
> really find any prominent ones. The note on http://fedoraproject.org is 
> also easily missed. Is this a deliberate decision? Should there be some 
> of co-branding within the distribution and a prominent hint in other 
> places?
> 
> Something like Fedora - Powered by Red Hat/ Sponsored by Red Hat or some 
> such.
> 

A *huge* -1 here

We've already spend lots of effort getting rid of the widely spread 
prejudice of being Red Hat's pre-enterprise private little playground 
project or distribution, and explaining that we're actually a community 
powered project instead (Yes, sponsored by Red Hat. Yes, upstream to Red 
Hat's Enterprise Linux product *and proud of it, might I add*).

I'm not even sure we actually did get rid of that prejudice entirely. It 
may still exist in some people's heads.

Anyway, correctly and fully exposing how Fedora is related to Red Hat, 
and how that works for both the community and Red Hat, with mere mortals 
on the one side, and business customers on the other, is way more 
important then getting the long-term users back on board because they 
missed out on Red Hat renaming the free/gratis distribution to Fedora, 
making Red Hat their Enterprise product.

Honestly, I don't think it's our problem someone missed out on all this 
  back in the day. If they're really interested / valuable as 
contributors, it'll come naturally. If not, it'll still come naturally 
with the work of our Ambassadors and thanks to other exposure.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip