I don't agree with the notion that some how Fedora is going to be any less stable than the "free" RH9 many use on this list now. If you believe that RH will base it's commercial product on a "release" of Fedora, then you should also believe that they are going to actually use the source code from Fedora for those products as well. I doubt seriously that they are going to be taking their commercial product and doing much more than adding some nice value adds to Fedora.
Only time will tell. If you look at they're current RHEL (well, version 2, anyway) it was based on an antient version of RHL (I believe the 7.x series).
My guess is that they'll take the best of the best from Fedora, eliminating potentially buggy progs, and include that in RHEL. As they say, "Each new release of our supported products will be based in part on a recent release of Fedora Core." What's to say that something suitable for Fedora isn't suitable for RHEL so they us a more stable version or pull the package all together.
The point is, what's /suitable/ for Fedora isn't necassarily /suitable/ for RHEL.
The Fedora project is actually making RH more open to general developers. So, now anyone can contribute, get involved, and one day (if their coding is good) become active in the source with checkin capability. Same way Netbeans and other projects work. I use Netbeans for commercial work all the time. Love it. This is the same senario Sun uses for their Sun ONE Studio. They have Netbeans out there in the open source world for free. They then take those releases, put in some value adds and a few looks here and there, then stamp Sun ONE Studio on it, and call it a product. Look for the same in Fedora.
I like Sun's model. I used OpenOffice for some time. I decided to try StarOffice to see what "value adds" they offered. StarOffice 6 didn't offer much over OpenOffice 1 (mainly some clip art and Adabas--along with some proprietary filters) so I didn't buy it. StarOffice 7, however, offers much over OpenOffice 1--so I bought it.
But in so buying, I know that neither Sun nor OpenOffice will have another /major/ release any time soon. The software is very stable and most of the work in progress is to add features--not fix buggy software.
Sendmail is a bad example--full of security problems and performance issues, it just happens to be the MTA installed by default on a number of distros. Most of my local Linux-ers have ousted it for more stable options like Postfix or qmail.What other open source projects (products) do people on this list use for commercial applications? I'm willing to bet you use them all the time. Look at Sendmail for instance. People set that guy up on machines all day long. Same with BIND. Does anyone assume they are any different on any other platform, or are they a "release" from the sendmail group just compiled by somebody else? Who uses PERL or SED or AWK? What about MySQL or PostgreSQL? Anyone ever heard of Apache? Think about it.
Let's look at Sendmail, though, with the others you mentioned. /All/ of the software you mentioned has a relatively long release cycle--that is, they're not coming out with release several times a year (at least not major ones). *Red Hat's "Non-Objectives of Fedora Core" states that there /will not/ be a "slow rate of change".*
I agree that the Linux community in general is always evolving. However, for /production/ software to work and work well one has to reach a balance of release cycles /and/ stability--something only a handful of projects have achieved. Red Hat Linux 9 and before continued to get more and more bloated; required more system resources to effectively use; and had worse performance than other distros with similar configurations. (Though I continued using it for features like RHN.)
I'm not a developer but I know from experience that each new release tends to draw new bugs and security problems--this is what tends to worry me, especially with Fedora's stated mission of new releases "several" times a year.
Despite this, I haven't discounted Fedora--yet. I'm watching to see what comes of it. New rollouts will /definately/ not run Fedora but will run RHL 9. In the meantime, I'm going to be evaluating some other distros (mainly Debian) to see how they stack up. If Fedora continues down its current path than I'll continue the move to another distro.
Don't get me wrong, Red Hat has put out some decent distros. But Fedora is clearly (in my humble opinion) not intended for production use (or in Red Hat's words, "non-critical computing environments").
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