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Red Hat Software Businesses Software Linux

Fedora Legacy Shutting Down 180

Posted by kdawson from the yum-update-and-pray dept.
An anonymous reader writes to pass on the news that the Fedora Legacy project is going away. The project has been providing security updates and critical bugfixes to end-of-life Red Hat and Fedora Core releases. From the article: "In case any of you are not aware, the Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down. The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained. Discussions... on the #Fedora-Legacy channel have brought to light the fact that certain Fedora Legacy properties (servers) may be going away soon, such as the repository at http://download.fedoralegacy.org and the build server."
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Fedora Legacy Shutting Down More

Fedora Legacy Shutting Down

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  • IMHO, dropping support for a system that is only 3 years old is a mistake. Everyone who hasn't upgraded to the latest versions of Fedora will loose support. Ubuntu provides 5 years of support with most of their major releases, so would it be so hard for Redhat to follow? I think that Redhat is trying to push it's Enterprise Linux a bit too strongly. I'd like to see the support window for future releases of Fedora to be extended.

    • Re:RH pushing EL (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wdomburg ( 141264 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @05:20PM (#17418078)
      Erm, Ubuntu supports for 18 months for most of their releases. Only one release has been designated "long term support" and that's only 5 years for servers; the desktop version is only supported for 3 years.

      And, on top of that, Fedora Legacy is not Red Hat, is not affiliated with Red Hat, and is not sponsered by Red Hat. As such their actions don't reflect on Red Hat.
      • Even though it's only one release, it's a big deal. I'm using Ubuntu 6.06 Long Term Support in a server I recently built my company for just that reason. Having the peace of mind that there will be regular backports for 5 years on my free OS of choice was a deal breaker.
        • I've been running Ubuntu on my laptop for a while now (a few days ater 6.06). Seems a solid enough distribution, so far, but I'd personally hold off using it on a server until they a longer track record and a formal definition of "support".

          When you're talking server platforms, Fedora was never a viable platform (despite some folks insistance on running it as such). For something Red Hat flavoured, you'd want to look at CentOS.
        • I'll point out the obvious - you haven't received five years of backports - yet.

          Tell us again in five years when Ubuntu has kept their promise.

          I'm not saying they won't - but five years is a long time in IT. Right now, you can't guarantee Ubuntu will even exist in five years. Red Hat has a track record - of that long at least.

          Also, I find this notion that servers can't be touched for five years because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is reaching for the moon in terms of reliability - and strikes me as mor
          • You're right about it not being guaranteed, and if I have to upgrade it I will. However, the less time I have to spend upgrading servers the more time I have for stuff my bosses actually care about.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Wdomburg ( 141264 )
            Five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments. It's not laziness to avoid massive expenses - the upgrade itself, retooling config files (e.g. Apache 1.x to 2.x), recertifying hardware, porting or rebuilding software, running everything through a new QA cycle, etc. There's also issues of SLAs which may require customer approval for major software changes or incur penalties if critical systems need to be downed for the upgrade (and god forbid anything goes wrong).

            Edge into e

            • SLAs are an external matter.

              As for the rest, my guess is that in most cases with any medium or large business, business needs (new services, new marketing, new regulatory, whatever) are going to force doing all that anyway, regardless of what the OS vendor actually does.

              I'd like to see a survey of companies who will admit to having run the exact same server for five years (recent years, not ten years ago) with no changes.

              Most of the stuff you mention is either something that shouldn't take "man years" of ef

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by Wdomburg ( 141264 )
                As for the rest, my guess is that in most cases with any medium or large business, business needs (new services, new marketing, new regulatory, whatever) are going to force doing all that anyway, regardless of what the OS vendor actually does.

                That's largely a matter of software running on an operating system, not the operating system itself. With commercial software you're actually more likely to have a requirement on an older platform than a new one (plenty of apps out there are certified for nothing newe

                • I didn't say replace the CAR, I said replace the PARTS!

                  That's HOW you make a car run seven - or ten or fifteen - years.

                  It's the same with a server. You're suggesting running the car for ten years without changing a part just to avoid putting in a part that won't work right. While software isn't as simple as a car part, this is still incorrect.

                  And it doesn't take five years to plan a production environment upgrade - that's ridiculous. The PLANNING can be done in a month - it's the actual upgrade that can tak
                  • It's the same with a server. You're suggesting running the car for ten years without changing a part just to avoid putting in a part that won't work right. While software isn't as simple as a car part, this is still incorrect.

                    Most operating system vendors put out these neat things called patches (or updates, or errata) to fix things that are broken. Those are parts. Moving to a new version of the entire operating system is akin to buying the next model year.

                    And it doesn't take five years to plan a product
              • "SLAs are an external matter."

                To the IT department. Many companies have internal SLAs from IT towards other departments. Anyway SLAs are for a reason which is still quite valid within the company: don't disrupt bussiness.

                "I'd like to see a survey of companies who will admit to having run the exact same server for five years"

                I'd say you would be surprised with the answer. They are high numbers.

                "If your planning is decent, an OS upgrade should not be a make or break event."

                Still, planning costs money, and
        • Having the peace of mind that there will be regular backports for 5 years on my free OS of choice was a deal breaker.
          don't you think its a little premature to assume that? ubuntus first release was just over two years and has made one LTS release which they have been supporting for less than a year.

          When dapper+8 (4 years after dapper) is released and both dapper and dapper+4 support have been provided for all that time then assuming ubuntu looks healthy it will be time to rely on ubuntus long term support p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      IMHO, dropping support for a system that is only 3 years old is a mistake.

      I hate to say so, but Microsoft usually does better than this. I still get security updates for Windows 2000, even though the last service pack came out in 2003. With Gentoo, packages drop out sometimes as little as 3 years after they appear, which is not good, and SuSE isn't any better. I can understand dropping full support, but security support should still be there. After all, some customers can't easily upgrade because of leg


      • I still get security updates for Windows 2000, even though the last service pack came out in 2003.
        Right, because Microsoft has a policy to support a release for something like 8-9 years, and they're a company that's supported by software sales. Windows 2000 is also a production level OS. What was the policy on Fedora? 2 releases? How much did you pay for it? $0? Also, FC has always been understood to be a bleeding edge system that you shouldn't put any kind of production system on.

        The point is if yo

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dan Ost ( 415913 )
        When a package gets dropped from portage, it's because nobody is willing (or able) to maintain the ebuild (and any required patches). That only happens with unknown software that nobody uses or software that has been completely outdone by its competition such that nobody uses it anymore.

        I'm just going out on a limb here, but if your business chose to use certain software, you probably didn't choose software that nobody else uses. That right there will probably prevent it from being dropped from portage (if

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )
          The problem with Gentoo is that often, older versions are removed from portage, presumably because the maintainer only wants to maintain the new version. This bites those who can not upgrade to the newer version. A prime example is dev-lang/perl, where you now have the choice between perl-5.8.8-r2.
          That leaves those who have to stay at perl 5.6 (or even earlier) kind of out in the cold. And 5.6 was retired as early as Feb 2004, which is *WAY* too early.
          There's large vendors that still ship their product w

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dan Ost ( 415913 )
            Ebuilds for older versions of everything in the portage tree are available in CVS if you need them. I do realize that at some point the system changes enough that old ebuilds might not work properly without tweaking, so if you have vendor supplied software and can't build it yourself, perhaps Gentoo isn't a good match for it.
    • What is up with everyone pointing fingers at Red Hat? Fedora was never supported by Red Hat. Fedora is a community driven project and the Fedora Legacy project just didn't have enough community interest. Now the Fedora community is rethinking how it can support older releases... Red Hat has nothing to do with any of it.
      Regards,
      Steve

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Znork ( 31774 )
      Compare Fedora with the Ubuntu minor releases and RHEL (or CentOS) for the major LTS releases.

      If you look at jkeatings blog is sounds more like an extension of support time for the FC releases is likely, and those requiring long time support are pointed towards RHEL/CentOS, which probably are better matches for long term needs anyway.

      Personally, I'd say the existence of CentOS made the legacy project far less essential.

    • Ubuntu provides 5 years of support

      That's a popular myth, but Ubuntu has not existed for 5 years. A more correct statement would be "Ubuntu states an intention to provide 5 years of support". That's not the same thing as a real support contract from a company that you're sure will still be around in 5 years time. Anybody could state an intention to provide N years of support, but that doesn't mean that you'll actually get it. (Redhat - not Fedora - have been providing such long-term support contracts to cert

    • I've been a faithful RedHat/Fedora Core user for years, but obsolescence happens too fast for anything but test or playground machines these days, where you don't mind a complete reinstall every now and then.
      Since I don't need RedHat's support, my servers now run CentOS [centos.org], and everyhingthing else is on Ubuntu [ubuntu.com].
    • "IMHO, dropping support for a system that is only 3 years old is a mistake."

      IMHO, the mistake is using a distribution that won't guarantee its long-time stability or upgrading procedures for any production-grade purpouse.

      "Everyone who hasn't upgraded to the latest versions of Fedora will loose support."

      As if they wouldn't have to know that would happen when they firstly started to use Fedora.

      "Ubuntu provides 5 years of support with most of their major releases"

      Ubuntu provides 5 years support on *one* of the

  • Debian supremacy!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is just another little step to Debian supremacy!!! Go GNU/Linux Debian!!! The Universal Operative System!!!

  • To be expected... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @05:24PM (#17418098)
    Fedora's whole mission is pretty much implement the cutting edge and let people experiment and play with it. The target audience was inteded to be those desktop users/enthusiasts who would jump on the current release anyway, since it is free. If any business saw a distribution like Fedora and thought it a good idea to base their infrastructure on a Fedora Core release, they are now getting basically what they asked for.

    I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, it's more an acceptance of what people should have perceived all along, Fedora isn't trying to be that kind of distribution. If you want that kind, go to a commercial vendor (RHAT, Novell) or go with something like CentOS or Debian, which have clear missions/policies that align with that sort of usage. Could consider Ubuntu, but I wouldn't be that confident in Canonical yet, but the LTS is at least a stated mission and Canonical has a vested business interest in being considered a serious business worthy option, while Fedora obviously hs no such vested interest. Similarly, I wouldn't use Gentoo or OpenSuSE in those contexts either, their missions are valid, but not in line with common business desires/needs. Debian and CentOS do, and generally end up 'boring' in the eyes of enthusiasts, and Fedora Core, Gentoo, Ubuntu's 6 month releases, etc all are generally more interesting to the enthusiast, but can't provide legacy support and the cutting edge all the time.
    • Fedora's whole mission is pretty much implement the cutting edge and let people experiment and play with it. The target audience was inteded to be those desktop users/enthusiasts who would jump on the current release anyway, since it is free. If any business saw a distribution like Fedora and thought it a good idea to base their infrastructure on a Fedora Core release, they are now getting basically what they asked for.

      That's pretty harsh considering that they 'knew' Fedora Legacy was out-there.

      Most of my c
      • Here's the bottom line on your complaint: use the hardware supported by your OS or go with an OS you don't need paid support for.

        It's that simple. And little different from Microsoft, IBM, Sun or anybody else in the hardware and/or OS business.

        Buying stuff less than six months old and expecting an older server release to support it is not reasonable. Running Fedora Core instead of a server OS to get around this means you get to run new hardware - with no support.

        Make up your mind what you want to do. The so
        • Running Fedora Core instead of a server OS to get around this means you get to run new hardware - with no support....Make up your mind what you want to do.

          I'm not sure if you're responding to my comment - the grandparent post posited that Fedora was only interesting for Desktop use - I pointed out that people run it for new server hardware. Obviously it's without corporate support - my comment about Redhat illustrates that.

          • I responded to your post. You seemed to be complaining that your clients couldn't run Red Hat server products because they didn't support newer hardware or newer versions of apps that your client obtained. GP post pointed out that if you run a non-server OS, you can't expect the same level of support - which is true.

            My point was that that's how it is with server (and enterprise) software: you either go with what hardware is supported or you try to get around that by running a non-server OS with no support e
            • . GP post pointed out that if you run a non-server OS, you can't expect the same level of support - which is true.

              Right, we're in agreement (I think) - I was pointing out that Redhat doesn't offer the same level of support on new hardware which is why it wasn't a valid choice for that application, therefore why some people run Fedora on servers.

  • Microsoft must feel vindicted (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @05:29PM (#17418128)
    Call me a troll if you may but, Microsoft must be laughing on hearing such news. You see, there were [Linux] zealots here saying Microsoft should release versions of Windows it does not support to the "community." This "community" could do a better job supporting these operating systems.

    My question though is whether what is happening to this Fedora Legacy would not happen to released Windows versions. I have my doubts.

    • Since Fedora is free there is little reason to still use old releases. Upgrading is free. Windows, not so much. I am running Fedora Core 6 right now and I don't see why you'd want to run an older release. Stable and the software is up to date. I wouldn't trust it on a server but that isn't what it's designed for.
      • "Upgrading is free."

        Only if your time values nothing.

        "I am running Fedora Core 6 right now and I don't see why you'd want to run an older release"

        That only means you don't know better, not that there are no reasons.
        • Upgrading windows takes the same amount of time as upgrading a linux install.

          Do you have any reason whatsoever to run an old version of Fedora or are you just being contradictory? Do you know better?
          • "Upgrading windows takes the same amount of time as upgrading a linux install."

            Yes. And that's (among other things) why so many people are still running Windows 2000 or even Windows NT.

            "Do you have any reason whatsoever to run an old version of Fedora"

            Not a single one (but currently I don't have any reason to run any version of Fedora, be it old or new either).

            But I do have reasons to run old versions of Linux (some other distributions). Main one being "if it runs don't touch it". No matter how easy or c

    • Different strokes... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      There are community projects that do explicitly do Long Term Support, Ubuntu 6.06, CentOS are two glaring examples of making a point of it, and Debian in practice has been that sort of distro. Gentoo, Fedora, et. al are catering to a different, more aggressive sort of mission that somewhat conflicts with the notion of legacy support (frequent releases produce too many overlaps in a long term model, having to maintain 4-5 different trees is not feasible. Ubuntu is doing a decent compromise (6.6 is long ter

    • Microsoft must be laughing on hearing such news.
      I hardly think Microsoft really cares. As Bill Gates pointed out, Linux is like the multi-headed hydra. It doesn't really matter of one of the heads is cut off. Anyway, FC had never been about long term support. If you chose it expecting that you'd be able to run the same OS release for years, that's your mistake.

      This "community" could do a better job supporting these operating systems.
      I don't think anyone has said that there's a need to support every OS M
    • Fedora is supposed to be a bleeding edge distro of Red Hat technology that is frequently rebuilt and released. Fedora Legacy, although well intentioned was sort of misplaced for this technology Why would you want legacy support for a very experimental software distribution. If you need real enterprise stablity you should be using true Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS. I would never use Fedora for any server or workstation that I wouldn't want to manage rigorously.

      Fedora does a lot of good for the Open Sourc
  • This is horrible...plain and simple.

  • If you need longterm support, use CentOS (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nighttime ( 231023 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @05:38PM (#17418182) Homepage Journal
    From Internet News [internetnews.com]

    Typically a Fedora Core release comes out every six or seven months. Red Hat's flagship offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), by contrast, comes out every 18 to 24 months. Under the new lifecycle plan a Fedora Core release would have 13 months of support.

    "Anything beyond this really seems to be corner cases that would really be better served by something like CentOS for free, RHEL for rock solid support, or Oracle for crackmonkies," Keating wrote. "What does this mean for the "Legacy" project? We feel that the resources currently and in the past that have contributed to the Legacy project could be better used within the Fedora project space."

  • CentOS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KidSock ( 150684 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @06:11PM (#17418368)
    Unlike most people I don't reinstall the OS on my laptop every couple of months. Thanks to Fedora Legacy I'm happily running FC 3 and had no plans to reinstall. But now I think I'll have to look seriously at CentOS (RHEL repackaged without the copyrighted material like logos and such). RHEL (and thus CentOS) is supposed to be less "cutting edge" and more about stability over the long term. And because CentOS is just RHEL you know it's going to have more vitality than a community driven project.
    • Actually, since RedHat cut support for RH9, even for those of us that JUST PAID FOR IT a few years ago, I think I finally have the final reason to FINALLY quit RH all together.

      I tried to buy the box sets of RedHat, they took my money then changed their way of doing business. I tried to pay them for support, they took the money and ran away without giving the support. I installed FC knowing I would have legacy support, and now I don't. I tried to pay them about $350 a year just to download updates for a f
      • "those of us that JUST PAID FOR IT - a few years ago"

        What's wrong with this statement?

        I "just" paid for my cell phone four years ago - and today Cingular (who, by the way, bought AT&T FreeToGo cell service a couple years ago, so talk about changing the terms of business!) is refusing to allow any customer to put any more money on the FreeToGo account, forcing an upgrade to their own GoPhone service. The actual cell phone TECHNOLOGY used for FreeToGo is being TURNED OFF on March 31, 2007.

        So I go down to
        • "those of us that JUST PAID FOR IT - a few years ago"

          What's wrong with this statement?

          I "just" paid for my cell phone four years ago - ...


          I think you misunderstood the statement. The parent post was saying that, a few years ago, he bought a boxed copy of RH9, only to find RH9 support/development cut with little warning shortly after he paid for it. The complaint was not about support being cut four years after buying RH9.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by DA-MAN ( 17442 )
            I think you misunderstood the statement. The parent post was saying that, a few years ago, he bought a boxed copy of RH9, only to find RH9 support/development cut with little warning shortly after he paid for it. The complaint was not about support being cut four years after buying RH9.

            IIRC, RH gave users who bought 8/9 a year of support for RHEL WS 3.0.

            If in that year, you liked it you could continue to pay for it. Otherwise convert to CentOS or switch to a different distro. RH didn't leave anyone hanging.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KidSock ( 150684 )
        Debian, here we come...

        You mean Ubuntu? If you want long term stable support I think moving to Debian is exactly the opposite of what you want. Debian has way too much religion now and they're behind on updates. I'm still running "stable" on one of my servers and I don't get some security updates for months. I'm itching to move that to CentOS too. I suspect the Debian devs all run "unstable" and basically don't care about everyone downstream. I know there are a lot of Debian fans on ./ but you have to admit
        • Although it isn't a popular statement, I don't trust Ubuntu. At any time they can do exactly what RH has done, and I fully expect they will sell out as soon as it will create the greatest financial return.

          I was preparing for a migration to SuSE and had already installed it on my personal boxen, and then Novell starting signing deals with MS that are questionable at best.

          The problem is, there are many choices if you want to run linux, but there isn't any distro company out there I feel comfortable with, and
    • Planning on doing the same. I'm currently running FC6 on my laptop and primary workstation but CentOS-4.4 on my server. I needed more current hardware support especially on my laptop but I'm thinking CentOS-5 should provide everything I need plus stability, automatic updates to point releases, etc.

      I had originally updated from FC4 to FC6 to get the bcm43xx driver for the laptop. The only problem is the bcm43xx driver doesn't work with my AP unless I run the AP fully open (WEP authentication times out bef

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 )
      Thanks to Fedora Legacy I'm happily running FC 3 and had no plans to reinstall. But now I think I'll have to look seriously at CentOS (RHEL repackaged without the copyrighted material like logos and such).

      Why?

      Even after 6 years of using Linux, it still amazes me how little impact an O/S upgrade typically is. Unlike Windows, where it takes a few weeks to get everything downloaded and installed, and where you always have to put up with a significant amount of data loss, Linux O/S upgrades are relatively painl

      • Unlike Windows, where it takes a few weeks to get everything downloaded and installed, and where you always have to put up with a significant amount of data loss, Linux O/S upgrades are relatively painless.

        A few WEEKS?? I've gone from booting from the Windows installation CD to back in full operation in a day, including patches, application installation, and data restoration. It's a long day, full of waiting while stuff runs, but it's still a day. Heck, I've started at 9 or 10 at night, and was done by

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcrbids ( 148650 )

          A few WEEKS?? I've gone from booting from the Windows installation CD to back in full operation in a day, including patches, application installation, and data restoration.

          IMHO, it usually takes a few weeks to get all the kinks worked out. But let me ask you this:

          1) Are you migrating Email accounts from a dozen (or more) users on that system?

          2) Data includes the likes of quickbooks? (Many Windows applications do NOT keep their data in your user home folder! This is much less common for *nix apps)

          3) Are thin
    • This is precisely why I switched to CentOS a couple years ago and I haven't looked back since. It's absurdly stable (for me at least). It just works and I haven't touched my machine to do any system updates other than "yum update" for the last couple years. That's been very nice. I donated to CentOS and will continue to support them.
  • Legacy users ought to fork the Fedora project in order to support their releases. Surely, there has to be enough talent out there to do this...oh wait, let me guess, you want other people to do the hard work for you, for free? Hrm...better try Ubuntu.

    No, seriously, I don't use Fedora so I don't really care that much. But those feeling burned by this ought to unite and take over the legacy support.

  • Just one more thing to nudge me back to Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CapeBretonBarbarian ( 512565 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @06:34PM (#17418490)
    This is interesting. I've been slowly moving from the Unix world (Sun/Solaris) to Linux for a while. As part of that, we have been porting applications to Fedora/Red Hat. Lately though, I've been more and more impressed with Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). Frankly, I don't see much of an incentive anymore to run Linux on a production server. The only thing Linux seems to deliver better at the moment is x86 driver support and desktop apps. While I don't think we'll necessarily stop our efforts to create a more platform neutral set of applications, I suspect we'll be staying on Solaris for some time. Incidentally, I have no trouble receiving patch support for any of Solaris 10, 9 or 8 production servers. I like the longer support time lines that Sun offers (and much of it for free by the way).

    • I've never used Solaris before so I can't compare it to Linux; however, IMHO, there are a lot of options available in the GNU/Linux world an my personal experience is that Fedora tends to be one of the worse. There are many other free distros that are much more into delivering a real product that their users can be productive with instead of the treating their users like lab rats.

      If OpenSolaris works, than more power to you. Otherwise I'd suggest you try one of these out (In no particular order): Gentoo, U

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Builder ( 103701 )
      I'd be on Solaris 10 tomorrow morning if there was a way of running Windows as a guest on there (VMware, Qemu, etc.).
      I recently tried to move from Fedora to Ubuntu, and detailed the fun involved here [blogspot.com]. It would have been easier to move to Solaris if not for the virtualisation thing!
      • I believe Solaris has its own virtualization method but it would be nice if it could run Xen. Xen is one thing that linux does better than anything else, NetBSD is working on it but they don't have LVM support.
      • Just out of curiosity, why are you running Fedora on your servers?

        Use RHEL instead. If you don't have the budget, a clone (like CentOS or Whitebox) will perform just as well, but won't have the paid-for support. The version stability of code is there, and you won't have to re-learn how to manage the box. The version of Exim included with RHEL 4 is 4.43. Out of date, but likely still supported... *shrug* At the very least, it comes complete with an exim.conf.

        If you want code stability AND fresh softwar

  • This is becoming crazy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hdparm ( 575302 ) on Sunday December 31, 2006 @08:50PM (#17419108) Homepage
    Every time the story with Red Hat logo is posted, number of clueless comments increases exponentially. Listen up:

    Red Hat is listed corporation. As such, they have to make money to their shareholders and they seem to be doing well, so far.

    Huge amount of its workforce time, expertise, money and infrastructure is contribution that RH provides to Fedora Project, free OS of high quality. Everybody is free to join and contribute in many different ways, regardless of technical ability. Although decision making process within the Project was in RH hands, this is changing drastically and Fedora is close to becoming true community effort.

    Red Hat made great deal of contribution to wider FLOSS community over time by releasing code, hosting projects, open-sourcing acquired proprietary code, etc.

    Fedora Core IS NOT RHEL beta. It makes sense for RH to base its enterprise product on the code tested by wide user base, familiar with RH way of doing Linux.

    Fedora Legacy was never RH project. Sure, RH people work on it but that is on their own time. Interest for it vanished. It does not make sense anymore. End of story.

    Red Hat is not out there to screw anybody - not you, either. That's what Microsoft and their puppets are for.

    If you don't believe this, do join one of the Fedora / RH mailing lists and you'll quickly find out that Red Hat employees are the harshest critics of their own work. Plenty of smart people on those lists, you may even learn something.

  • This bums me out. I have been running server very successfully for years with RedHat 7.3.
    I've received many updates from legacy. I don't want to change this machine. In fact last time I tried an update Anaconda failed :-(
  • I've often wondered about this. Redhat pissed off many of their biggest fans, myself included, with the move to commercial Redhat and free (beta) Fedora. Like many other linux users, I skipped Fedora entirely in favor of CentOS and Ubuntu, etc.

    Redhat has stockholders to answer to and did what they thought was the best thing at the time to maximize shareholder value. They're still making money, which is their primary concern, but according to the page rankings on distrowatch.com (not scientific, I know) Redh

    • I wonder if Redhat had a do-over if they'd still commercialize Redhat they way they did.

      Have you been watching their revenue growth quarter after quarter? 30% to 50% year over year revenue growth for the past 16+ quarters. While their business decision was frustrating for some of us it was definitely a good "business" decision.

      While its not the same thing as the previous RHL distro many of us enjoyed working with, Fedora is an excellent distro with a thriving community and with proper attention can even be

  • So... (Score:2)

    by rodgerd ( 402 )
    I can either run my home Fedora 3 server unsupportable, upgrade to a recent version of Fedora (a fairly fraught process if the crappy FC 1 -> 2 -> 3 process is any indication), or bite the bullet and go to Debian or Ubuntu server.

    The answer isn't looking good for the last RH box in my house.
    • Or use CentOS, which keeps your redhat-ish knowledge useful, and have a good lifespan of updates available.

      steve
  • I've been using RedHat since 5.0, and remember the great service they did with the 1.0 disk drives pre-loaded you could order.
    But lately it seems like RPM has stagnated, and Fedora appears to be confused as to its direction, and finally, the upgrades have been getting harder lately. Ubuntu is one of the first Debian derivatives that seems to work as well as RedHat has done, with well-done installers, etc. I suspect that with the handwriting on the wall about upgrade support from the Legacy project, my nex

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