[ Thanks to S.Ramaswamy for this link.
]
“How has Red Hat Linux 6.2, or as my friends call it, “Linux
6.2,” been received by the community?”
“Bob Young: I don’t know yet, to be honest. Some of the
reviewers who were looking for desktop applications were lukewarm
to our release because it didn’t do much better toward adding more
games and applications. But the real focus was making a production
release, with quality assurance and these sort of things. A lot of
system administrators and serious users of this technology see it
as a huge offer. The people who were looking for something
flashy to run their word processing haven’t been as impressed.
Fortunately, our target market is the serious user.”
“So, from the outside, Red Hat 6.2 doesn’t seem different from
6.1, but from the inside, there are some real improvements.”
“Bob Young: Yeah, not as many of the changes are cosmetic. You
won’t be hearing much “Woo, is this ever cool” from the novice
user. But the serious user sees a lot of advantages.”
“Would that show signs of a maturing company in the Linux
community?”
“Bob Young: It’s very consistent of Red Hat and shows to a
certain extent why Red Hat is where it is today. I wrote a paper in
1994 called “Revenge of the Propellerheads.” The premise was that
open source suddenly gave the engineers more input into the
technology than the marketers. The reviewers tend to be
non-technical users — they plug it in, install, and say whether
it’s cool or not. Typically, the aim of the marketers is to impress
the reviewers.”