Re:Heh, seems Red Hat was right from the beginning
Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 24, 2006 04:26 PM
Nah, they just weren't wrong - which is a different matter. You can make two products "Enterprise" and "Community", but besides marketing labels - what are the true advantages?
The GNU/Linux kernel has for at least 10 years been divided or labeled "stable" and "unstable" with a system for version numbering. Does "stable" equal "Enterprise" and "Community" equal "unstable"? This does not seem to be the case for Red Hat and MySQL.
The danger with talking about two products for different markets is that the Enterprise version might go in one direction whilst the Community edition goes in another direction, creating an "incompatible" fork which is difficult to incorporate. I would love to see numbers on this from the Enterprise team - how much extra time and effort is spent on incorporating cool stuff from the crazy community into the cool stuff from the enterprise funded development?
I think Novell has the better model - the community edition becomes the enterprise edition, much like the "unstable" kernel becomes the "stable" kernel. That makes just "one product" to manage, one "development economy" - which makes more sense to me.
Both methods have their strong and weak points, so if I may refrase your subject title from "Heh, seems Red Hat was right from the beginning" to "Heh, seems Red Hat made the right choice for themselves from the beginning" you may understand why I started with saying they just weren't wrong.
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Re:Heh, seems Red Hat was right from the beginning
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 24, 2006 04:26 PMThe GNU/Linux kernel has for at least 10 years been divided or labeled "stable" and "unstable" with a system for version numbering. Does "stable" equal "Enterprise" and "Community" equal "unstable"? This does not seem to be the case for Red Hat and MySQL.
The danger with talking about two products for different markets is that the Enterprise version might go in one direction whilst the Community edition goes in another direction, creating an "incompatible" fork which is difficult to incorporate. I would love to see numbers on this from the Enterprise team - how much extra time and effort is spent on incorporating cool stuff from the crazy community into the cool stuff from the enterprise funded development?
I think Novell has the better model - the community edition becomes the enterprise edition, much like the "unstable" kernel becomes the "stable" kernel. That makes just "one product" to manage, one "development economy" - which makes more sense to me.
Both methods have their strong and weak points, so if I may refrase your subject title from "Heh, seems Red Hat was right from the beginning" to "Heh, seems Red Hat made the right choice for themselves from the beginning" you may understand why I started with saying they just weren't wrong.
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