Fedora 6 Review Review

"A software distribution is meaningless if it does not include all of the software that the target userbase expects to use." That quote is quite interesting. I'll get back to it in a second.Here is the post in question.

This review written by Jem Matzan is more of what I would classify as a rant. Hell, I don't even know how it showed up so high on the Google search. But it did, so now I guess this rant will be propagated into the mind of people as to whether or not to try FC6. Basically everything he came across was just small side effects of his individual use case scenario. The things he discusses are not really issues that the Fedora Core team have as goals of addressing, their 'mission statement' so to speak.

The target userbase of Fedora is a group of people Jem doesn't fit into. Which means he is not their "target userbase" I mentioned above. In reality, it's great that FC6 is so easily adaptable to those not in the target userbase. I very likely should be a SUSE user, or a Slackware user, or maybe a Debian user; but I am still able to adapt Fedora Core (and Extras) to my uses.

As another example the review's author brought up MP3 support in Fedora. The Fedora Project addresses this on their About page as such: "Why is mp3 the standard? Because it's better than everything else out there? No. mp3 is the standard because its creators licensed it broadly to spur its adoption. Then, once it was the de facto format, they started to enforce their patents aggressively and restrictively." I could discuss more problems with the review but I feel no need to do so. I also do not wish to personally attack the author, and I hope that any criticism was constructive.