RHEL 3.0 or Fedora for a 'production environment' ?

[Paul Jakma]

oh aye, one or two other general points worth considering:

- From experience, I know it actually can be very hard, to get
management to move on or assign any meaningful priority to taking out
a support contract with RedHat, even if they do grok why it would be
a good thing, (ie "even if we never use it, it helps towards ensuring
that the company who provide us with and (some) of the people who are
involved in developing the OS which the business runs on continues to
exist/can continue to work on the OS. And if actually one day need
it.."). So, to my mind, the Fedora/RHEL split should help towards
getting those companies who see value in having support for their
Linux dist actually paying for it (which is a good thing), as this
makes it an actual tangible cost issue (ie cost of time vs RHEL, see
below.).

- RedHat actually will still be putting considerable engineering
resources into Fedora, and you can still avail of the fruits of those
resources for free, gratis, simply by using Fedora. However, if you
need long-term security/bug fix support, you're going to have to do
it yourself or find someone else who'll do it for you (for free that
is). Which is a fair enough deal, RedHat do not /owe/ you long-term
support :). Plus, the community hopefully will be involved aswell in
providing resources for Fedora.

- If your time is too valuable to spend on rebuilding SRPMs and
possibly having to backport patches or else tracking Fedora releases
and hence having to do the QA (both release itself and upgrade
procedures), then you still have the option of paying RH to do this
for you and provide longer-term supported releases :). How the 'cost
of your time' vs 'cost of RHEL' balances out is a matter for
yourself. As for the cost of RHEL, well, thats a matter for their
S&M, but couple of hundred bucks for a workstation with office suite
/with support/ isnt a bad deal really.

I dont know, seems like a very fair deal to me, esp on the second
point. RH did not /have to/ do that. But RH have, to my mind, a very
good track record on balancing their own needs with those of the
greater community, and this move, imo, continues that record.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
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