Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter? [LWN.net]

Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

Posted Nov 13, 2008 7:12 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587)
Parent article: Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

The more cynically-minded among us might conclude that Fedora 11 will be stuffed full of bleeding-edge new stuff that the RHEL team wants to evaluate...

This has always been the case. On one hand Fedora can be obtained for little or no cost, with the users then paying for it in other ways (things breaking between upgrades, packages shipped before they're ready for consumption, updates which cause regressions, etc). On the other hand, Red Hat pays for a large chunk of open-source development (thereby making life better for everyone), with the money coming from support contracts for RHEL, which itself is a polished version of Fedora.

Ubuntu fills the niche between the quality of RHEL and Fedora, though at the expense of coming across as a leech (in a number of cases this portrait is deserved). At the same time a typical Ubuntu release is much more polished than a typical Fedora release -- a big part of the reason for Ubuntu being so popular. If Fedora doesn't like to have their thunder stolen in terms of features, or indeed becoming irrelevant, the answer is simple: don't release half-baked goods.

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Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

Posted Nov 13, 2008 8:17 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

You got to realize this. If Fedora hadn't included what you refer to as "half baken" goods, then those goods will reach other distributions in a much much worse condition.

Being in the forefront of new development or being conservative is a choice. Either choices has their benefits as well as costs. Assuming that being conservative is the only valid choice is wrong.

Regardless of the amount of testing that happens in development releases, Fedora frequently does find and fix bugs after those features gets into a general release. They get fixed in Fedora and in upstream as well. Many of the Fedora users understand this and are happy to be involved. Other distributions should also be thankful someone else is trail brazing development on behalf of them,

Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

Posted Nov 13, 2008 14:02 UTC (Thu) by kh (subscriber, #19413) [Link]

Excuse me if this changed already and I simply did not notice, but maybe the best thing Redhat/Fedora could do from a marketing prospective is to have an executive at Redhat state they have decided to go after the desktop market.

(The last I remember hearing, Redhat's (then?) CEO said they were avoiding the desktop market altogether... why should anyone then be surprised that there is more enthusiasm for a desktop project from a company who's leader has made the desktop their primary focus?)

Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

Posted Nov 13, 2008 15:11 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I don't Red Hat or Canonical disagrees much on the profitability of consumer desktops

http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-wit...

http://blogs.computerworld.com/ubuntus_shuttleworth_i_don...

If there is already common understanding in the business prospects, there is then, a common challenge on making it more viable. Red Hat continues to invest heavily in desktop technologies and I am sure there is a commercial interest there for now and in the long term as well. Executive announcements just for posturing won't help.

Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

Posted Nov 13, 2008 19:13 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yes.. The desktop still is critically important for Linux.

Right now Microsoft (according to common wisdom) controls the only viable platform for business desktop. Because of this they get more hardware support, more application support, more everything then Linux.

It fundamentally cripples the ability for Linux to compete in a huge and profitable market, even if your goal is to make money from servers. Microsoft has control of the desktop platform and because of this they are in a position to control how it operates and they use this to their advantage.