I agree this could be worded better in the proposal, but I want to point out a crucial distinction — you’ve paraphrased this as “Red Hat is achieving [its] goals with Fedora”, but the actual wording (quoted above) is about a specific goal: “whether Red Hat is achieving its goal to make Fedora Workstation the premier developer platform for cloud software development”.
The overarching goal of Red Hat’s investment in Fedora is to make sure this is a successful, healthy community project that explores innovation while also providing a good upstream for RHEL. That’s what they pay me to help with — and the first part is important, not just the last. (Fortunately, the last is also nicely in line with the Fedora Mission.) Beyond that, I don’t think it’s right to say that anything is a “Red Hat goal”, exactly. Rather, different people at Red Hat (both organizationally and personally) want to accomplish lots of different things in Fedora, or to help Fedora accomplish various others. None of those are around productization or commercialization.[1]
It’s dangerous for me to speculate about the RHEL business side of things, because that’s really not my area, but on this specific goal…
Red Hat makes and sells a “RHEL Workstation” product, but it is a very enterprise-oriented thing. Its customer base is not really like the Fedora user base at all. Red Hat formerly had a “Desktop” product, but a few years ago, dropped that. It’s really hard to make any money at all from a general-purpose desktop OS, and Red Hat has decided not to try. Red Hat IT has even switched from RHEL for the official corporate desktop offering to a Fedora Linux build.
But, out in the world, that leaves an ecosystem vacuum.
As a community project, we in Fedora do have a very strong interest in providing a general-purpose end-user Linux desktop OS. A little more than a decade ago, when Fedora was kind of at its most depressing point[2], there was some talk (inside and outside of Red Hat) of steering Fedora away from the desktop, focusing on a cloud/server OS. We could have taken that approach, and ended up being something like Alpine or Wolfi. We decided, instead, to embrace the “Fedora.next” plan[3] and encourage Workstation, Server, Cloud — and a plethora of other spins and deliverables.
And that’s worked out! We (Fedora) have a great desktop offering.
Many people at Red Hat would like Fedora to succeed in filling strategic desktop ecosystem space without being a product or productized[4]. And in particular, to succeed in areas which are obviously key to the Red Hat business (like, “cloud software development”[5]). That doesn’t mean that’s the only area that RH wants Fedora to succeed (again, see the overall goal!), but it’s one that’s pretty easy to sell to management and the business folks.
Of course our amazing desktop relies on the wider community, both in Fedora and upstream — that’s how it should be. But, there’s also a lot of Red Hat investment. It is reasonable to me that the Desktop team backs the goal of positioning Fedora Workstation for success in a way they can use to justify increased investment in their team, Fedora overall, and the Linux desktop.
Well, at least not serious ones. For all of the recent feeling of big-corporate, RH does have a culture where people are encouraged to have different ideas, and so I’m sure someone has these. ↩︎
see this talk! ↩︎
see Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Editions, Spins, and Interests) ↩︎
because there’s not seen to be a future in that ↩︎
You can see free and open source investment in this in other areas, like container tooling (and in particular Podman Desktop ↩︎