On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Wolfgang Bornath wrote: > 2010/10/20 Michael Scherer <[email protected]>: > > > > "Jeroen: One of the big, essential differences between Fedora and other > > distributions is that weâd rather gain one contributor than a dozen > > users. In fact, if I could lose 1000 users right now and gain a > > contributor, Iâd do it. Itâs not up to me, but if it were, Iâd do it." > > This seems to me a very short-sighted point of view. It may be right > if you start a project and you do not have enough contributors to get > it going at all.
The reason why Fedora isn't much interested in mere users is because Fedora is not a real community distro at all. Fedora is first and foremost a testbest of new technologies for Redhat, to experiment with new code that might then later be incorporated into RHEL. Redhat doesn't care much about the end-users of Fedora, they only care about attracting skilled developers, since those represent extra unpaid labour for them, that ultimately benefits their commercial RHEL distro. Despite that (and despite what most people think), most of the work on Fedora is still done by Redhat employees. Without Redhat Fedora would cease to exist (at least in it's current form). I know this might sound harsh to some who didn't know this, but that's the reality of it. If Mageia takes off (and I'm sure it will) it will actually become the ONLY other large community distro besides Debian and we might even attract quite a few Fedora devs that want to switch to a REAL rpm based community distro.
