How many Fedora users are there?

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 1:09 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: How many Fedora users are there? by ajross
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

> 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:

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

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