There are a few differences to take note of. First, the Red Hat Linux product is now being called Fedora. A little history: The Fedora Project came about in 2002 by a group originating with Warren Togami of the University of Hawaii. Its goal was to come up with a repository of 3rd party RPMs, all with a standard format to ensure quality and compatibility. Over the past several months, Collaboration between Red Hat, Inc and the Fedora Project got closer to the point of Fedora and other community being able to make substantial contributions to Red Hat Linux. At this same time, RH has been rolling out new versions of its Enterprise Linux line, which has release cycles of 12-18 months and Product Lifetimes from 3-5 years. Then it became apparent that it's not cost-effective to support both an Enterprise Linux line and a free community line all by themselves.
So, what we have now is somewhat of a fork of Red Hat Linux. The enterprise line gets a long release cycle with a long maintenance period. Fedora Linux is the community branch. It still gets RH's developers' time, but the community now has a much more direct involvement in the development of the distribution. It's the bleeding-edge side of Red Hat, and the developments that happen in Fedora Core can eventually be moved up into new versions of the RHEL products. Fedora's aim is to release 2-3 full releases every year. Unfortunately this means that there's no company that will guarantee updates to older versions for any period of time past new versions. That pretty much makes it a bad choice for production machines, in which case one would look to the RHEL line. However, there's a side project of Fedora, the Fedora Legacy project (http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraLegacy) that aims to provide security and bugfix updates to old releases for several years. For anyone needing true commercial support, I really recommend Red Hat Enterprise Server. Pricing starts at $349 a year, which includes all updates, free downloads, and the RHN subscription. For hobbyists, Fedora is a great thing to use. You just need to be willing and able to upgrade a couple times a year. Red Hat has no intention of abandoning the desktop. Some people were up in arms about a recent article where a RH exec was quoted as saying that Linux is not ready for the desktop. All he was saying was that for a non-techie home user, we're not there yet. I think most of you can agree with that at least in part. They _do_ have an Enterprise Workstation product, with price starting at $179, and a large portion of their research and development is spent on making the desktop more friendly and usable. So, where did I get all this info? Most of it is on www.redhat.com and http://fedora.redhat.com. A lot of it has come from conversations with members of the Fedora Project and from Red Hat developers, who I have conversed with for years on IRC (irc.freenode.net, channels #redhat, #fedora, #fedora-devel, #rhel). A lot of the developers and managers actually participate in the channel there, and can answer questions about Red Hat and Fedora development. On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 15:26, carson bankston wrote: > OK, I feel like most of this is because of my > comments. Hopefully, I just misunderstood what > RH was doing. If they've done nothing but rename > their desktop edition to Fedora, then why is this > news? > > Lastly, I'm not upset at RH wanting to make > money. That's what made me like them in the > first place. It was just my understanding that > they were abondoning the desktop. > > carson > > > > --- -ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > They didn't even drop the freebie distro, just > > renamed it to Fedora. They > > just weren't making money selling support and > > boxed copies of it, so why > > bother. I think they'll still "support" Fedora > > in much the same way AOL > > used to support Mozilla, and Sun supports > > OpenOffice. > > > > ray > > > > > > On Thu, 20 Nov 2003, Dustin Puryear wrote: > > > > > Does everyone realize that Red Hat > > Enterprise, the business version, is > > > still around and kicking? Red Hat only > > dropped their freebie desktop > > > distribution. > > > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: "carson bankston" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > To: <[email protected]> > > > Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 1:47 PM > > > Subject: Re: [brlug-general] Red Hat's Dead, > > But Linux Lives On > > > > > > > > > > Really disappointed. I've been tinkering > > with RH > > > > for about two years and even implemented a > > RH > > > > server with Squid. Decided it was cool and > > even > > > > shelled out some pretty serious dough to > > take an > > > > official RH course in Dallas. It may not > > be the > > > > best solution, but I'm dropping any pursuit > > of RH > > > > and throwing everything behind SuSe. > > > > > > > > carson > > > > > > > > __________________________________ > > > > Do you Yahoo!? > > > > Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail > > AddressGuard > > > > http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > General mailing list > > > > [email protected] > > > > > > > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > General mailing list > > > [email protected] > > > > > > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > > > > > > > -- > > > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > > Ray DeJean http://www.r-a-y.org > > Systems Engineer > > Southeastern Louisiana University > > IBM Certified Specialist AIX > > Administration, AIX Support > > > =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > General mailing list > > [email protected] > > > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > > > ===== > Network Administrator > Parkview Baptist School > (225) 291-2500 x.105 > > "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, it is difficult to > predict where they will land." - stolen and misquoted > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now > http://companion.yahoo.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
