[NTLUG:Discuss] Red Hat 9.0 End of Life 04/30/2004

[Stuart Johnston]

Chris Cox wrote:
 >
> We already see OpenOffice as a group of developers
> with handcuffs to Sun... then Sun makes money from
> Star Office using that work at the base.  I wonder
> how motiviated developers are when they know the
> end result is the commerical deliverable??
> 
> RH has publically stated that their goal is to
> follow after the Star Office model.. Fedora is
> the "community" working toward making a good product
> that RH than can then (with much guidance on the
> fedora development direction) use for their
> commercial deliverable.
> 
> I wonder what would happen if the fedora "community"
> strays too far from their RH "guidance"??

Everyone keeps talking about the Open/Star Office model but I think it 
is also interesting to look at the Mozilla/Netscape example.  It may be 
a little early to tell how loosing the corporate support will affect the 
long term development progress but as soon as the 'handcuffs' were 
removed, there was a definite shift in the attitude and focus at 
Mozilla.org.

Hopefully, the fact that the Fedora Project was founded with an existing 
community project will help it keep a open, community focus.


Stuart Johnston