On Wed, January 7, 2015 09:48, Jonathan Billings wrote: > On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 08:45:29PM -0600, John R. Dennison wrote: >> It's not relevant in _any_ sense. CentOS is nothing more than (at >> it's core) a rebuild of RHEL. This type of nonsense should be >> directed to Red Hat in a Red Hat venue. It's nothing but >> off-topic noise here as CentOS will not deviate from its >> upstream in its core offerings. > > Agreed. > > If you want to participate in how the upstream OS is being shaped, I > suggest looking at the Fedora Project, which is driven by volunteers. > > If you notice the Subject: of this thread, it is "Design changes are > done in Fedora". Pretty clear message. > There is a common word disguised in the letter E that we find in both the initialism RHEL and the acronym CentOS. It is the the word Enterprise. It is my observation that the subscriber base to this list tends to those who have wider responsibilities than deciding what the corporate GUI desktop layout should look like next year. Most here also seem to be somewhat concerned with concepts of cost and benefit. It is evident in many posts that the increasing costs of supporting large numbers of people negatively impacted by changes introduced to CentOS from outside of their span of control is beginning to impinge more and more upon decision making. In some cases that consideration is evidently influencing the decision to deploy CentOS or not. Now, what does the subscriber base to Fedora developers list look like? Well, to begin with there are no fewer than 209 official 'Fedora' lists. Which should one join to 'influence' anything? Let us grant that a number, say half, are self-evidently not of great concern to operational deployment and employment of RHEL, CentOS or SL in the Enterprise environment. The oddly named 'UK-Ambassadors' or the narrowly focused language translation mailing lists for instance. That still leaves in excess of a hundred lists. Where should one apply pressure? What forum exists to discuss the economic costs to Enterprises of introducing a marginal, possibly questionable, improvement to an existing UI or common utility? The devel list? The users list? A perusal of the contents of both the Fedora devel list and users list does not give one much hope that such a point of view would be tolerated, much less welcomed. For example, one the the notable contributors to those forums is himself banned from this list. Further, discussions tend to be far, far down in the weeds, if not subterranean altogether, when viewed from the perspective of the question: what is this change, improvement, alteration or deprecation going to cost the installed base to implement? No, no-one presently on this list is likely to have very much of an impact on the folks that are the Fedora project. Their objectives are far removed from the concerns of those tasked to keep automated systems working and invisible to the Enterprises that employ them. The overarching concern of the Enterprise is to employ capital and labour to produce value; and not simply to prove technologies or advance personal or political agendas. Not that the later two situations are uncommon in the Enterprise either. One might, however, consider that the CentOS list is a concentration of people that evidently have some status within a number of Enterprises. And these influential people have chosen not to pay RH for their offering. It might be of some interest to RH in determining why this is so. It might also be the case that this forum, being concerned with issues such as deployment on a large scale and the costs of upgrading RH flagship product, provides valuable insight on how RH's paying customers might be viewing their product as well. After all, because we use CentOS rather than RHEL and forgo the provision of RH's expert advice, then we ourselves and our organisations are a self-identified technologically advanced user community. And we are concerned more with the entire package than with any particular component or detail. If we have concerns and reservations then perhaps RH should have concerns. If we express them here then there is a chance, a small chance but a chance nonetheless, that someone at RH with a view a little broader than that evidenced in most of the traffic on the Fedora devel list, might take notice. IMHO, FWIW. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3