[Wolves] Novells Gnome

[Peter Cannon]

On Monday 15 May 2006 10:24, Simon Morris wrote:

> I think that incident is unfortunate - I wouldn't use Fedora Core for a
> production system and Red Hat are correct to push their more mature
> products forward to their customers. But doing this undermines their
> community based product. Nasty situation and I bet Novell would
> recommend the same when it comes to SLES and OpenSUSE.

With my money grabbing capitalist hat on I don't see this as a problem.
The problem rests with the users in not understanding what they are 'getting 
into', its always been clear to me that 99.9% of the freely downloadable 
stuff is;
1. So that the vendor can claim association to free/open source.
2. So that the community can, test, fix and improve.

They'll then nick the best bits for the 'Pay for Version' all of the free 
(money) stuff will always be pants it has to be.

I understand that, I accept that, hence I don't use bleeding edge stuff and 
wait a good month or so before upgrading, if I wasn't such a tight git I'd 
pay for RHEL4.

I don't think Red Hat or Novells position undermines the community (In My 
Opinion) the community undermines itself by thinking the version they have is 
stable/better. True you can make it very stable but at the end of the day 
that stability will just end up in the proprietary version anyway.

Back in the bad old days people used to be Beta testers for games and all 
sorts, you got the game for free played it for hours then reported any bugs 
or problems. Most of the games producers have gone the other way now and just 
ship the game anyway and then post fixes when needed.

Fedora is just the same as the old days of Beta testers when you think about.

-- 
Regards
Peter Cannon
FC5 & SuSE10
Jabber:highwayman.turpin at gmail.com
www.cannon-linux.co.uk

"There is every excuse for not knowing
 There is no excuse for not asking"