Fedora and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"

Jonathan Roberts jonrob at fedoraproject.org
Tue Apr 29 16:13:30 UTC 2008


I haven't sent this yet as I'd rather get other people's thoughts too,
and I'm sure some are able to be far more accurate than I am!

best wishes

Jon

------------------------

I just read this article and was disappointed to discover that you
seem to have severely mis-represented the Fedora Project. If I can
take a few moments of your time, I'd like to advise you of the
specific points in the story where you've been mistaken, and also to
invite you to start a dialogue with the Fedora Project by contacting
us on press AT fedoraproject DOT   org to avoid making the same in the
future.

"...Red Hat has a preview of an upcoming Fedora Development release,
Version 9..."

Firstly, Fedora is not a Red Hat product but a community maintained
distribution of which the majority of packages (over 60%) are
maintained by non-Red Hat employees. Secondly, Fedora is not a
development release in anyway, but a stable system that showcases the
latest free and open source software. It's true to say, on the other
hand, that Fedora is an innovative distribution that leads the way in
the adoption and development of a lot of new technologies, feeding
back all improvements and changes we make up-stream for the benefit of
all.

"Fedora 8 is the currently available development release, which got
underway in April 2007 and which was launched last November. A lot of
the code that was hammered out in that Fedora 8 development release is
winding its way toward Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2"

Again, any final release of Fedora such as version 8 is not a
development release. A lot of the code from that release is making
it's way into RHEL 5.2, but you know what else, it's making it's way
into all other GNU/Linux distributions too including Ubuntu, Debian
and openSUSE. This is because we push our developments to the upstream
communities, which other distributions then base their own work
around.

"Remember, the Fedora 9 preview is just that--a preview--and is not
even to be considered beta code yet and hence is not appropriate for
anything close to production environments."

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but Fedora 9 will not be a
development release, and you're mis-representing the facts by
suggesting that the preview release is not even to be considered beta
software. The preview release is very close to what the final release
will be, and is where a huge number of bugs will be squashed to make
sure that the final release is on a par in terms of stability as well
as features with any other distribution.




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