Submitted by When a group of Red Hat Fedora developers, engineers, and mangers got together last month for a three-day summit in Westford, Mass., the goal was to establish short- and long-term plans for future Fedora projects. The brainstorming session resulted in a road map that will lead to changes for the Fedora community as a whole.
I understand the fedora project will have some sort of support for older distributions. But I have multiple Core 3 and 4 systems. The announcement gives me no support or patches for those systems, this is unacceptable in a corperate environment. I have been a fedora advocate for over 2 years, but with no firm assurance of support for anything over 1 year old I cannot trust my infrastructure to Fedora.
I refuse to move to SUSE afer the Novell-Microsoft agreement, so over the next month or 2 I will be evaluating Ubuntu for my systems. I like the freedom and philosophy of Fedora, but this is making it unworkable.
<rant>
This is your fault for ignoring the release support plan and purpose of Fedora. Redhat makes no money off Fedora, and cannot reasonably support it indefinitely. Fedora Legacy is a volunteer project, and perhaps if it is that critical to your corporate environment you could make a contribution of developers or money. Sorry, but nothing makes me more angry than corporate customers getting mad at FREE open source projects (when they do not contribute themselves).
</rant>
That said, if you want enterprise class support, look into Redhat Enterprise Linux, SuSe Linux Enterprise, Oracle Unbreakable or CentOS.
Feel free to rant, but you do not no my circumstances. I am not an enterprise customer. I do not expect enterprise support. I do not need enterprise support.
I am in the education sector, I like Fedora, I participate in the mailing lists and bugzilla. I know what Fedora stands for, and I support it. My main motivation for using Fedora is it’s philosphy of free software. I do run CentOS where appropriate for Oracle and the like.
But in any type of production environment having patches stop for your infrastrcuture without any notice is enough to get me mad, and make me consider moving.
Ranting does not help anyone, and I hope I wan’t ranting.
I believe the rant is at your using the wrong tool for the job.
You complain at the ranter yet your ranting yourself.
Why are you getting mad for Fedora doing exactly
what they told you they are doing?
But in any type of production environment having patches stop for your infrastrcuture without any notice is enough to get me mad, and make me consider moving.
Which is exactly the point. Fedora was never meant for production systems, and never claimed to be. The fact that you deployed the wrong system for a particular purpose makes it your fault, and yours alone.
try centos…
try centos…
Yep we need to emphasize this. You’re more than right.
For desktop systems Fedora is really nice. You get to try the latest stuff at an acceptable stability level (3d desktop, mono, xen, and many other bleeding edge software).
Otherwise just go with CentOS. It’s just what you’re looking for.
Fedora Legacy current model is dead. Another will emerge as discussed on
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/ReleaseProcess
Edited 2006-12-20 10:15
Ubuntu contains binary and non-free software. Should be discouraged. It is hurting the free software community.
Although I’m not immune to occasional display of Fedora fanboism, it’s not difficult to see that Fedora has to change something. The Core and Extras issue has to be solved in an elegant way, and there are other repository issues (Livna, fr, rf) that need attention.
The Fedora lifespan has not so much to do with “Legacy”, imho. Few Fedora Core users will beg the Fedora project to keep support FC3 or older when FC6 is out. Just use CentOS. The problem, I feel, is the release cycle. Many people feel 6 months is too short. Ubuntu Dapper/Edgy and Fedora Core 5/6 prove that: if Dapper/FC5 are too good, Edgy/FC6 are not immediately attractive.
A year, on the other hand, is a bit too long. And it’s bad for a distro to be associated with a certain season. So dull. So why not follow human conception and birth and make it around nine months?
Distrowatch Ladislav won’t mind.
There are good argumens here. But Why does Ubuntu have the LTS release? Forced upgrades are not a particularly good solution for the server. The Desktop? On the desktop I am a feature whore and upgrade as soon as I possibly can. But if my servers are working, other than security fixes, if I don’t require the new features, why upgrade?
But to get security fixes I am expected to upgrade working systems every 6-7 months for features I don’t need.
Only you can decide to upgrade or not your system. You can still use it and backporting some security fixes. Afterall, SRPM are available.
When RedHat went with their RHEL strategy, they basically made sure to cripple their free distribution to a point where it became useless for 99% of people. Their basic strategy was to release countless useless updates after another and to have extremely short lifecycles. This put it out of reach for corporations, public entities, and even regular home use. However, at that time, the Linux landscape was different so they got away with giving out crippleware. Debian had completely lost its way, Mandrake was betacrap, SuSE was proprietary, and Ubuntu did not exist. Today, the landscape has changed and people are leaving Fedora very quickly. RedHat needs to reevaluate what Fedora is or they will quickly relegate their distro to the dust bin. I understand that they need to keep RHEL distinctly different in terms of support and backwards compatibility, but at the same time they need to figure out a way to make Fedora relevant.
Have you forgotten that Fedora is about latest free and open source technologies?
When RedHat went with their RHEL strategy, they basically made sure to cripple their free distribution to a point where it became useless for 99% of people.
Where did you find that statistic? How can a free distribution that does not contain a closed source applications crippled?
Their basic strategy was to release countless useless updates after another and to have extremely short lifecycles.
Fixing bugs related on vulnerability or upstream issues are useless?
Today, the landscape has changed and people are leaving Fedora very quickly.
Yeah, that is why the number of download of Fedora Core 6 what cause the main server to crash and the huge Fedora community like Fedora Forum show, http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
I understand that they need to keep RHEL distinctly different in terms of support and backwards compatibility, but at the same time they need to figure out a way to make Fedora relevant.
RHEL primarily aimed to government and large enterprise while Fedora has a different target. Fedora is still relevant being the base of olpc and RHEL. The model is only evolving.
People keep saying use RHEL instead of Fedora. Fedora may be the upstream of redhat, but although fedora is sponsored by redhat, fedora is not redhat and is a completely seperate project/product from RHEL. I may be using the wrong distribution for my needs, point taken. But CentOS is not ncessarily the solution.
Fedora is the only distribution which is completely free, see their FAQ if you disagree. Fedora is robust and solid. My only struggle is with there lifespan. There was no notice for the patches stopping, simply an announcement, and with no warning I now have several servers which will nolonger receive security updates until I upgrade or migrate.
Technically Fedora is brilliant, but to have this type of announcement thrown at me without warning is not. I would have no complaints if there had been a phase out. But now I must re-schedule everything I do to make sure these boxes are upgraded. My complaint is with the way they have managed this.
Fedora’s strategy is simple. Claim, unofficially, to be production quality when it is convenient. When called upon to actually act like maintainers of a production quality OS, site the fact that you have never officially claimed to be production quality.
I fell for that strategy years ago. Now I’m happy with CentOS.
As to Fedora being the “Most Free” distro… that and a quarter’ll getcha a cup of coffee. I’ve little patience left for holier than thou games.