[wplug] RedHat and Fedora?

[David Ostroske]

Russ Schneider <russ at sugapablo.com> said:
> So what's everyone's take on RedHat discontinuing all free Linux 
> versions in favor of for-pay Enterprise versions and suggesting people 
> use Fedora if they want something for free?

Call me a heretic, but I wish them well. They're a business, and taking whatever avenues they must take to be profitable is in their best interest. It may not be in *our* best interest, but that's our problem, not theirs.

Fedora sort of feels like a cross between Debian and Mozilla in its stated development path. The distro will be community-supported (a la Debian), and it will be sponsored by, but not supported by, a major player in the industry (a la Mozilla). The only big difference from what we have now is that instead of just Red Hat rolling the packages, it will be Fedora volunteers, including many Red Hat folks. And if something works out well in Fedora, it could be worked into RHEL for Red Hat's paying customers.

Small businesses might be hurt, if they're reliant on the "Red Hat Linux" line and Red Hat Network. But I suspect that these companies have Linux-savvy people who wouldn't need support from Red Hat anyway. If they don't know something, then they can get help from online forums and local LUGs. (That would be us!)

As for security updates, I've been using the RPM version of APT for the past few months, and I love it. Even if Red Hat stops supporting RH9, there will still be people updating repositories with security packages and other tools. And "apt-get dist-upgrade" will still work for something. You might expect to see a few "forks" off of what was once Red Hat Linux. We already have uber-distros like KRUD, and Mandrake earned its identity by forking off of Red Hat.
http://www.tummy.com/krud

So there's a future for users of RH9. It won't be a single future. But that might work out best for people, anyway.

--- Random-firing neurons from the head of David Ostroske
    eksortso at linuxmail.org

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