Corey Burger wrote:
<snip>My understanding of what SABDFL has said is that there will never be an "enterprise" version with additional features available only at a charge (the Red Hat model). I wasn't suggesting that a "for-cash enterprise version" was in the pipeline, rather that the brand (and more specifically in this case the brand design architecture) may not support multiple diverse audiences. Given Goldman Sachs and [EMAIL PROTECTED] and blank piece of paper I wouldn't go through a brand development process and come to the _exact_same_answer for both. To word it differently, imagine two parallel products - *-buntu Corporate LTS (out-of-date, rock solid, stable platform for corporate applications/server) and *-buntu Community (the new new bling bling) and where both are free and both share the same underpinnings. As far as I am aware, my hypothetical *-buntu Corporate LTS could even emerge as Cannonical Linux. The work being done to simplify the re-branding of ubuntu for derivatives (eg Guadalinex) also makes sense for corporates (eg JP Morgan Linux) or a split of the branding message. Please note: I am not specifically proposing or supporting these outcomes, just suggesting that similar pressures on existing computer operating system vendors targeting the same customer segments has led to targeted branding in most of the cases that come to mind. Numerous examples can also be cited from the non-computer world (branding of cars for consumers vs. trucks for business). Milton Friedman wrote a book called "The Tyranny of the Status Quo." Very roughly, in any system governed by voting (cf government) there are the following outcomes: (1) it is difficult to push the mean other than in a crisis and (2) when the forces for change (the top end of the bell curve) and the forces for no change (the bottom end of the bell curve) are both small, the great middle sides with no change. I was about to talk about government handouts to small special interest groups (cf the US sugar industry), but I realized I was drifting off topic. (Google James M Buchanan)However, for the time being I predict the tyranny of the status-quo. My point was that in a voting/community system change is hard without perception of a crisis, and that in this cases there is no perception of that crisis, therefore there will be no change. This goes double for a "soft" issue like branding where the results are difficult to measure, but unlike, say, a proposed change to the kernel code where performance can be explicitly measured. If we don't adopt John's proposal, we can never know how many installations we missed out on because they didn't happen. Tim |
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