[Techtalk] RedHat - Fedora Linux

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 01:04:12AM -0500 or thereabouts, Julie wrote:
> Caitlyn Martin wrote:
> >avarweth at vanadium.sabren.com (Jennifer) wrote:
> >
> > >This is news to me! I would have chosen a different distro if I'd
> > >known! I can't  believe the price difference for Enterprise!
> >
> > > >I think most people here are aware of the fact that RedHat Linux
> > > >will no longer release any distro after RedHat Linux 9, except
> > > >RedHat Enterprise Linux...
> >
> >My understanding was that they would no longer offer support on any
> >product except the Enterprise Server, but that Red Hat 10 would be
> >available for download and retail sale.  Did that change?
> 
> I hate to be stupid, but what exactly does this mean?  I'm running
> RedHat 9 at the house.  Does this mean I'm going to be forced to
> shell out major bucks after 12/31/03?!?

Disclaimer: I am married to a RH employee, but that doesn't mean
I understand any of this particularly well. Or at all, possibly.
But here's some links. 

http://fedora.redhat.com/ is the site. There are several mailing
lists associated with it. There is also a FAQ. The mailing lists
are on the main RH listserver. Look for those beginning fedora- on:

http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/

I think this next email is a reasonable summary. Although it's in
reply to someone complaining on the wrong list. fedora-test-list? 
Dear me. 

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2003-September/msg01289.html

Havoc Pennington (RH guy) also made an analogy along the lines of
"think of Red Hat Linux forking into Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 
one side and the Fedora Project on the other". 

I think (think :)) the idea is that RHEL will be the one where 
companies can pay for support and get instant reaction and 
engineers on site or whatever it is big companies expect as a 
matter of course. But it will come out very slowly, with older
software which has been tested a lot and is solid. And the
Fedora Project has all the new stuff people keep demanding.
Because it's not a boxed project in shops (well, unless anyone
boxes it up and sells it?) it will be possible to have faster
releases. It's not going to turn into some gigantic CVS tree
you have to download everything from, and there will be releases 
of it, and I have been assuming that 'releases' means ISOs you 
can burn and pass along. 

One thing about the Fedora Project not being called Red Hat is
Red Hat will no longer need to go after people for selling CDs
which contain RH trademarks like that horrible 'shadow man' or
other specific images because they won't in it; and because
Red Hat isn't in the name, they won't get people who bought a
CD for $2 ringing up and saying "I bought a RH CD and the 
installer says I am entitled to installer support" and getting
upset when they are told "well, that was for people who bought
the boxed set" or whatever the problem was. So people will 
be able to sell CDs of this Fedora thing over the net, if I 
understand correctly.

As for support for old versions of Red Hat Linux, there has
been a lot of talk on the lists about "well, we'll do it ourselves
then". This list below has _just_ started up. So there's not much
there yet. There have been other people talking about doing
the same thing, so more may appear.

http://www.quantumlinux.com/mailman/listinfo/rh-consortium says

  About rh-consortium
 
  We seek to fill the vacuum that Red Hat is leaving behind. To do 
  this, we will attempt to provide errata updates for a specific 
  set of unsupported RedHat Linux systems. We might fail, we might 
  succeed, at least it's worth trying. 

Just as a sidenote, one reason I have liked RH (other than the
fact that they pay my husband, obviously :)) is that despite
being a commercial company, they are a very 'pure' free software
distro. Their installer is GPL'd, they switched to Mozilla early, 
they dropped other packages with dodgy rules, they made grip 
default to producing oggs even before they realised they'd 
have to get rid of .. erm, whatever it is that encodes to mp3. 

So I have no problem with not using those, or mplayer,
which RH doesn't ship. But there are now tons of people
complaining that they are moving to Debian, which I always
imagine as terribly 'pure' free software, just to get 
their mplayer/mp3/etc support.

Which seems a little surreal, somehow :) 

I know there are non-free repositories for Debian: it's
just that of all the reasons to switch to it, switching
for the non-free stuff seems quite.. well, not the reason
I'd have thought of.

Anyway, that's my understanding of it. Which is somewhat at
odds with some of the earlier posts. I could be wrong. But
I have been subscribed to most of the fedora lists since 
they were created. They are -very- noisy at the moment,
though. I may have missed stuff.

Telsa