How many Fedora users are there? [LWN.net]

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:28 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: How many Fedora users are there? by k8to
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

The image problem has existed to some people since 1994. After spending years in Red Hat support trying to combat that image.. I realized there is nothing that can be done to change it in those people's minds that have a bad idea about Red Hat. From what I can tell, it is a partisan/religous debate in their minds.. and so their brain does not process information favorable to Red Hat, but only see information that fits their cause.

All you can do is just keep trucking.

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How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 16:56 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

The image problem has existed to some people since 1994.

But, as I've pointed out, not to me. I used Red Hat throughout this period. Hell, if you google around, you'll probably find references to me defending you guys from the anti-corporate hordes. I was loyal.

Yet you have lost me as a customer. Now, one way to deal with this is to put your head in the sand and write my dissatisfaction (and, potentially, lost sales) off as an inevitability. Another is to question whether Fedora is worthwhile at all and (apparently) threaten them with resource constraints if they can't prove their popularity.

Still another might be to consider if, just possibly, it was a change in behavior on Red Hat's part that caused the loss of mindshare. One is tempted to point out that in 1994 (or 1997, when I started using the distro), every penny that Red Hat spent on development popped back out in a downloadeable ISO that we could use for whatever we wanted, just like we were "real" customers (which, I argue, we were). This wasn't true of SuSE, nor of Caldera, nor of any of the other now forgotten attempts at a commercialized linux distro. But Red Hat was Free, and we loved you guys for it. And we used your software. And when we got a chance to write checks for linux, we wrote them to you. And you won.

Where did that Red Hat go? From where I sit, the company seems to be called "Canonical" today.

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 12, 2006 18:18 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Hear hear. I stuck loyally with Red Hat from versions 4 through 7, even the bad days. Problem was, as Red Hat started going after the Enterprise market , they were leaving their day-to-day users into the ghetto (that's what it seemed like to me anyway). And that's cool -- they can do whatever they want. And now I mostly run Debian and Ubuntu.

Mugshot is pure comedy... I'd suggest cancelling that bizarre project long before worrying about Fedora funding!

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 1:09 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> One is tempted to point out that in 1994 (or 1997, when I started using the distro), every penny that Red Hat spent on development popped back out in a downloadeable ISO that we could use for whatever we wanted, just like we were "real" customers (which, I argue, we were).

Given that English in not my native language, I went and checked what the customer actually means. Here is the first hit (and others are similar) from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/customer:

------------------------------
1. One that buys goods or services.
2. Informal. An individual with whom one must deal: a tough customer.
------------------------------

Now, unless want to call downloaders "tough customers", it would seem that they were no customers at all :-). And that's the rub here.

Red Hat is a company (companies generally exist to make money). They identified the market they wanted to address (mostly, it would seem, Unix server replacements). With that market, they also identified their customers (yes, the *real* ones). They went for it and their customers decided to pay subscription fees for a certified distro. They made money. I'm not a fortuneteller, so I don't know what's going to happen next.

> Where did that Red Hat go?

See above.

Whether we like this or not, unless we're shareholders or employees of Red Hat, we cannot decide what they should do. It is completely up to them.

And free market competition will do the rest.

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 14:08 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I no longer work for Red Hat... I left 5 years ago to do other things for a while. I also only use RHEL at work since I do not have a reason to pay for it for home use (there I use Fedora, Centos, and rpath)

I was only trying to point out that back during the time I worked there (1997-2001) and before I worked there.. Red Hat had an image problem with a certain set of people who labeled Red Hat as "money-grubbing" in one way or another.

The fact was that the boxed sets were always a money loss. If we took the maximum number of boxed sets we had ever sold, we found that to cover the cost of developers, ftpsite, etc. we needed to charge a minimum price-point of USd ~75.00. Add on just installation support we needed to sell them at USD 85.00. [The reason for this is that for a listed price of 75.00, the company only sees about 35.00. The rest is selling through channel costs and dealing with returns by channel, etc.]

The only profits we made were for specific support projects, and they were not enough of them to really keep us going.

When we priced box sets at 60.00 for RHL7, we saw that the majority of the original Red Hat buyers saw that was too much for them and sales of that product were too low. The only way to make money on selling boxed sets was to not have more than 2-4 developers and 1-2 support staff (and hope the quality of the product didnt suffer *ha*).

Does this mean I am trying to convince you not to dislike Red Hat? No. I am just trying to explain things from my point of view.