[CentOS] Dag's comment at linuxtag

[Dag Wieers]

On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Bogdan Nicolescu wrote:

> BUT... when someone from the Centos team makes a statement like 
> "...latest release has many up-to-date desktop packages..."  or any 
> other statement that might imply, suggest, hint, or even smell of 
> breaking compatibility with RH, for whatever reason, I think a lot of 
> users will start looking for alternatives.

First of all, when I said this, I was no longer part of the CentOS team.

Secondly, I didn't say that literally, but I don't object to the wording. 
For desktop use we do have up-to-date desktop packages. Not firefox 3.5 
(wasn't released then) but a recent Network Manager, pidgin, firefox.

So I wasn't lying. If that means that people will look for alternatives, 
that's fine. I would be lying if I said that we only had old desktop 
applications, wouldn't I ?

CentOS already covers the server market, it doesn't need a push there. But 
a lot of people see CentOS as a pure server OS. Which I am trying to 
change by telling people how CentOS is perfect for the desktop for 99% of 
the people. I am leaving out the 1% of people that want to have the latest 
and greatest in everything, that are developers, or have religious 
technology preference. If Linux would have 100 million users right now, it 
wouldn't cover the potential 1% of the whole market if you look at a 
desktop-using population.


> Again, if your goal is to be 100% compatible with RH, then RH dictates 
> the package version.  And just in case some people are not very clear on 
> RH's goals for the foreseeable future:
>
> "It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no
> plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market
> in the foreseeable future."
>
> http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-hat-desktop-systems-an-update/
>
> This does not mean that other/extra repositories can't and don't exist, 
> but it should always be made crystal clear (and it has been a few days 
> ago), that the base is never compromised.

You read of course what you want to read. And Red Hat is right, they do 
not target the _consumer_ market. Which is fair. There is little money to 
be made in the consumer market (not if you don't have a lot of 
money/effort going to support etc...)

But they do target the Enterprise desktop market and therefor they do have 
a desktop product that works fine for what it is. And most people don't 
need more than that. (I certainly don't)

So don't make the mistake that so many others have made, which is that Red 
Hat is not interested in the Desktop. They are very much interested, that 
is partly why they bought Qumranet, and why they spend so much money on 
Desktop related development in Fedora.

Red Hat sees the desktop as the next step in revenue, but not in the 
consumer market. They see it in the enterprise market. That's crystal 
clear for me.

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
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