[Techtalk] RedHat - Fedora Linux
caitlynmaire at earthlink.net
caitlynmaire at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 26 15:37:33 EST 2003
Hi, Telsa, and everyone else,
Thank you so much for the clarifcation. It seems that support
(patches, etc..) for Red Hat through version 9 will die. It seems
that 9.1 or 10 or whatever will instead be called Fedora Core 1,
but that it is essentially the same thing. Of course, no shrink
wrapped copies and support limited to community and mailing
lists, but there will be errata (patches, whatever) available for
download. That seems reasonable to me.
To the struggling corporate entities who wanted something
free or cheap, and to small businesses, the new division between
Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise may not be acceptable. They may
choose another distro which has a low cost but commercially
available support package for small business. Red Hat
doesn't seem terribly concerned with this market.
Also, I look at the price points Red Hat has set for Enterprise
3 and I think that a lot of people who saw them as an
inexpensive alternative to Microsoft will think again. In that
sense this move hurts those in the Linux community who want to
see Linux as a genuine mainstream alternative to Windows.
Mandrake is in financial trouble and is therefore quite scary to
business. Debian and Slackware are virtually in the same class in
terms of support as Fedora, though some commerical support for
Debian by third parties does exist. SuSe is another possible
option, but their presence as a company in the U.S. is somewhere
between minimal and non-existant.
I don't know if this will help Red Hat turn a profit. I seriously
doubt it. I also don't think this will help corporate acceptance
of Linux at all.
In some ways, for individuals, Linux is returning to it's roots. You
have small community based distros that may employ a handful of
people or simply be labors of love. You have Fedora that has
commercial backing but are still claiming to be community based.
We, as individuals, aren't likely to buy an expensive "enterprise"
distro like United Linux wants to be, and which Red Hat
Enterprise and SCO (if it survives, which I doubt) claim to be.
Linux may end up once again being of, for, and by geeks. I
don't know if that's good or bad.
All the best,
Caity
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