On Sat, 10 May 2008, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:
Fedora would not survive without Redhat, unlike Debian or Gentoo.
There was a time when this statement was true. But I don't think it is
true today. Even if all Red Hat support for Fedora disappeared tomorrow
(which it won't, but we're playing pretend), I believe that the
infrastructure of participation that we have built up over the past few
years ensures that Fedora, as an independent, fully-functional operating
system, would continue to exist and thrive.
I'll quote myself from an interview I did with LWN last year, after the
release of Fedora 7:
"Red Hat will continue to be Fedora's biggest sponsor, providing
development resources, infrastructure money, bandwidth,
community-budget, FUDCons, legal support, etc.
However, I believe that it is ultimately the job of the Fedora Project
Leader, whoever that person is, to say "what do I have to do to ensure
that the Fedora Project can grow and thrive, *EVEN IF* all Red Hat
support were to one day disappear"?
It's a hypothetical question. But the answer is real. And the answer is
the critical path of Fedora in a 2-3 year horizon."
http://lwn.net/Articles/237700/
--Max