RHEL 6 beta version available

It's not surprising that EPEL's role was miscommunicated.

Getting a good idea of internal Red Hat corporate culture perception of Fedora and EPEL can be harder than gauging public perception.

What I would LOVE to see is a high profile public meeting of the minds between Red Hat reps, EPEL maintainers, and a panel of RHEL customers about how a roadmap for making it easier for customers to utilize AND contribute to EPEL and a set of accurate talking points about where EPEL fits in as a value proposition.

There's a lot of room to grow EPEL to better meeting customer needs...but that growth has to either come from sweat-equity from customers themselves contributing to EPEL and shaping it directly or be driven by customer cash channelled through Red Hat to pay for the manhours to build the infrastructure to make RHEL/EPEL synchronization more coherent than it is now. I'm an EPEL maintainer, but I'm not a RHEL customer and so I can't really speak to how EPEL fits into the RHEL customer experience. But what I need is for the conversation to happen in the open. If its always a conversation between a salesperson and a RHEL (potential) customer there's no way I can constructively shape that conversation.

-jef