On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 09:49:39AM -0700, Jeff Lasman wrote: > On Saturday 25 October 2003 00:01, Thomas Smith wrote: > > > Check out the links above. It appears that Red Hat is dumping their > > OpenSource version of "Red Hat Linux" and renaming it Fedora and > > stating that it's for "Developer or highly technical enthusiast using > > Linux in non-critical computing environments". > > That's Red Hat's official opinion. In my opinion, Red Hat's opinion is > based on their need and desire to sell their commercial product. IMHO, Red Hat has 2 main goals: 1. Make money - after all, they're a public company and have a responsibility to their shareholders. 2. Be able to support what they sell. The problem with Fedora is that they can't support it and still make money. They tried that with previous releases and failed. Red Hat has never said that Fedora can't be used in a commercial environment. After all, that's really not their decision. The decision resides solely with the customer who must judge the risks and rewards involved. If your system is naked on the Internet, Fedora might not be for you since there's no assurance (today) of rapid availability of security releases. If your system is nicely tucked in behind firewalls and properly configured, Fedora might work very well. I still have a production mail server running RHL 6.1. It hasn't received an official Red Hat patch in eons, yet we've maintained it ourselves using freely available updates. This situation is really no different in Fedora. Ditto with the rest of my 6.2 systems. > > I'd like to get some opinions regarding Fedora and its viability in a > > production environment. It sounds to me that Red Hat is simply using > > Fedora as a test bed and developer release for its commercial-only > > Red Hat Linux offerings. Red Hat has publicly stated this. They used 7.x and 8.x as test beds for RHEL 2.1 and RHEL 3. Let's not forget, however, the very significant resources that Red Hat has put into Red Hat Linux and is now putting into Fedora. In fact, they've got more people working on Fedora now than they had working on RHL. > While I have real concerns about using Fedora in commercial > applications, I believe they may just be overcome in time. In the > meantime, the Fedora Legacy group has committed to maintaining RHL 7.3 > into the future, and that's what I'm sticking with for now. My home system will be going to Red Hat Professional Workstation. My copy has already shipped. It's based on RHEL 3 WS, sells for $82 (buy.com) and it includes a full year of RHN for updates. IMO, it's a nice upgrade from my 7.1/RHN configuration before and a reasonable price (effectively $22 if you're used to paying $60/yr anyway). -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
