J5 posted a response to my RHEL quasi-review. Fortunately he just got added to planet.fd.o so I actually saw it. =)
I didn’t see any demeaning of Fedora users. In fact I saw a lot of praise. I don’t recall the words guinea pigs being used at all. It has been said all along that Fedora is a test bed for new technology that may end up in RHEL (and other distros).
There was some praise, certainly. But in many references, in that article and elsewhere, Fedora is relegated to something that exists purely to test features out for RHEL, rather than its own standalone distribution. Although it may be true that things pioneered in Fedora later end up in RHEL, I think the spin, if you will, should be played differently.
I’m suprised you would come down hard on Red Hat and then make a 180 and say the same practice is good for your distro. "Let Red Hat and Fedora be the guinea pigs for SELinux and when it is done we will use the results for our distro".
Honestly, it’s not about what RH is doing here as far as actual process. It’s about how it’s being played to everyone else. There’s a big difference between, “Fedora exists to serve as a testing ground for future changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” and “Fedora pioneers new technologies and concepts. If they’re proven, they could end up in RHEL too.” If this difference isn’t clear, then neither is my point.
Have you tried out the Evince PDF viewer or the gcj Java compiler? Incidently we don’t ship those proprietary add-ins in Fedora.
Indeed, there was a response on my blog about this, to which I brought some of this up. I’m a big fan of Evince in particular.
Striving for greatness 