On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Its not possible to get an SLA for Fedora from Red Hat. People > who want to sign up for SLA's usually also want a very long > support lifecycle. Trying to satisfy the customers who wanted > longer release and support lifecycles and people want a spanky > new Linux desktop was a tough balance. Red Hat decided to fork > it up. It looked like a pretty rational decision to me though > not everyone would agree with it. So calling the transition > from Red Hat Linux to Fedora Project "treacherous" was hard to > disgest. The problem is not why Red Hat did what it did. IMO the main problem is that Red Hat totally hid the Fedora Project from its users in the discontinutaion email that sent them. It said that's all, no free lunch anymore. I was in the Real World Linux Expo last week. Again, there was the Red Hat booth, with no sign or name of the Fedora Project. Somebody giving a talk mentioned it, just that. To me, it seems like Red Hat is trying to hide Fedora, in the fear that they lose their customers, while we all know that it can't be true. People do not buy Red Hat simply because Red Hat does not provide a free version. There are a zillion free distros out there. For more than 99 percent of personal (nonbusiness) users out there, Fedora is at least as good as Red Hat Linux was. This 99 percent never received any support from Red Hat. Never ever. But Red Hat makes it sound like Fedora is something community driven so low quality. --behdad http://behdad.org/
