[Pc_Support] RE: Bryan, the media is finally catching on to what you said about Longhorn

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>]

From: "Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>" <thebs413 at earthlink.net>
> People think a brand or product name means things are different.

I think we have an excellent proof of this in Fedora Core.

Every single thing I hear people complain about Fedora Core, _every_
single thing, was done between the releases of Red Hat Linux 7.2
and Red Hat Linux 8.0 -- 15-24 months _before_ Fedora Core's first
release.

Once Red Hat Advanced Server / Enterprise Linux 2.1 came out,
changes were made on Red Hat Linux 7.2 that was implemented
from the start of Red Hat Linux 7.3.

Red Hat announced updates only for no more than 12 months as
of Red Hat Linux 8.0.

The RHN didn't "shut off" updates, they just didn't make you pay
anymore.  You still get your updates from the RHN.  And they
merely renamed many lists from "redhat" to "fedora."  And they
made some Red Hat only internal ones more external.

Red Hat _never_ offered service level agreements and service
contracts for Red Hat Linux.  And you only got telephone support
if you bought a retail box -- something you can still do for $99
by buying Red Hat Desktop fka Red Hat Professional Workstation
which replaced Red Hat Linux 9 Professional on the retail shelf
overnight.**

[ **NOTE:  This had 100% to do with CompUSA complaining about
old stock of a product out-dated every 6 months.  RHD/RHPW is
out-dated every 18 months.  Novell is doing the same, introducing
NLD to replace SuSE Linux Professional -- which you most likely
won't see at CompUSA as of version 10.0.  It's available in ISO
form now. ]

But people will argue with me until they are blue in the face.
The Fedora magazines, FAQs and all sorts of stuff state the
obvious.  Heck, some of their own developers still call it "Rawhide"
and other things "Beta" when the official names are "Development"
and "Test" for trademark-lineage concerns.

The only reason they changed the name was due to trademark.
Everything else was already done over 12 months before the
name change.

In the same context, there are people who honestly believe that
Microsoft created .NET/C# "clean room."  Anyone remotely associated
with Java knows Microsoft had full rights to the Java 1.1 codebase,
and the early pre-releases bore the same Java identifiers.

Same deal with the Windows 95 Alpha and Betas.  They had OS/2
terms and filename extensions that were changed in latter releases.
Early MS IE developer shots from Spyglass, etc...

People just don't know that.

Heck, most people don't know that Novell almost went Linux well
back in 1994.  And the reason why their UnixWare codebase came
over to Linux so well was because they had Linux running in-house
since that time -- even after the UNIX purchase from USL.

Lineage.  It's everything.



--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org