The death of free redhat, or maybe just a new identity

[DaleDoe]

Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.

But the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which costs money, will be continued.
Source: http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/11/03/1657205.shtml

However, it seems to me that they're just giving it another name: Fedora. http://fedora.redhat.com/about/

It looks like it is a way of discontinuing technical support for Red Hat Linux, but continuing the project.

[Kade P. Cole]

Here is a good overview/review of Fedora.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5066

RedHat has just released most of what was called RedHat Linux to the Open source community and it is now called Fedora. I think this is good news for all. Now more people can work on this project and it will be updated more often.

[R. Andrew Lamonica]

The Robot Group is/was a subscriber to Redhat’s RHN which costs us about 30$ per system per year.  Then recently they sent out an announcement that the RHN(Red Hat Network) will no longer be in place and will no longer support our RH 8 and RH 9 systems.  However, they also sent us an idiots guide to remaining a Redhat customer and it boiled down to the following.

Redhat is splitting their OS into three (or four) products.  

1. Redhat WS(Work Station) will be provided to paying (or existing for the remainder of their contract) customers who want to use Redhat on workstations.  This will include updates and CDs from what was known as the RHN.

2. Redhat ES(Enterprise Server) will come in several calibers with different levels of support and power.  This is a paid product and costs a lot, but is the answer to professional site hosting and network management with full support from Redhat.  Existing customers can get a month free trial and media for this product.

3. Fedora.  Fedora (http://www.fedora.us) was a company that hosted updates and developer forums for Redhat.  The updates used the yum software (from Duke University) and mostly mirrored those Redhat provided to its customers.  Redhat has purchased this service (http://fedora.redhat.com) and is integrating it into their business model as described bellow.

According to Redhat’s website we should be replace our current linux systems with Fedora ones because Fedora has the following features that would be of benefit to us.

Free releases: Redhat will distribute ISO’s for Fedora for free using bit-torrent and FTP.
Frequent Releases: Redhat will have 2-3 releases of Fedora a year as compared to one every two years with its other two products.  Fedora is the testing ground for the other Redhat products and will thus be far more advanced.
Free updates: Redhat will manage updates to Fedora and provide them to its customers with the up2date software which will now be using yum underneath instead of Redhat’s usual software.  Redhat’s Fedora steering committee will decide what packages to keep and add to Fedora and when the testing/security tradeoff is at the right point to call an update stable.
More Packages: Fedora will include many (if not all) of the packages supported by the old Fedora project.  The Fedora project has always strived to be the most complete yum database and since Redhat is not offering phone/e-mail support for Fedora there is o reason for that to change.

I have installed Fedora (Core 1) on both my home-linux system and a system here at school and have been impressed with it.  If you want the ISO’s I have them at school (my office:EB1022).  I would love to hear what the die-hard linux users think about this.