Volunteers are calling it quits on a project called Fedora Legacy to provide long-term support for Red Hat's hobbyist-oriented Fedora version of Linux. "The Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down," said project organizers Jesse Keating and David Eisenstein in a Fedora Legacy mailing list posting Friday. The organizers didn't provide a specific reason for the decision, but a lack of contributions from outside programmers contributed, Keating said in a separate mailing list posting.
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Member since:2005-07-07
Fedora has been a disaster in this sense from the very beginning.
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Security updates alone are taken for granted and probably rightly so.
News for you before you spew more non-sense.
Fedora is a bleeding edge distro ment to satisfy people that want the latest. Its goal is and was getting hackers to work on it to get more stable RHEL. From the first moment it was said it is not suitable for corporate desktop. What you were describing were corporate usage cases not "The bleeding edge, one patch release newer than neighbours" like Fedora is. I don't remember one single time when RH or Fedora would say like you want to picture it.
If you want to use it like that, use RHEL or CentOS. Both are derivatives made out of Fedora. One free, one proprietary, but neither would be as good if there would be no Fedora. Just pick your poison.
Member since:2006-08-09
If you want to use it like that, use RHEL or CentOS. Both are derivatives made out of Fedora. One free, one proprietary, but neither would be as good if there would be no Fedora. Just pick your poison.
I totally agree, except for the nomenclature: RHEL costs money, but it's not proprietary. Ask Oracle and CentOS. 
Member since:2006-01-01
There is a very strong need for a very cheap or gratis Linux desktop that is supported for a minimum of three to five years. Ubuntu's founder here has scored a major coup by positioning the distribution as the right choice for all of the markets that I mentioned earlier.
Ubuntu's situation may not be quite as bright as you make it seem here. About 2/3 of the packages that Ubuntu makes available belong to the "universe" repository. But these "universe" packages are only maintained by volunteers, they don't receive security updates from the official Ubuntu developers. Also, Ubuntu developers don't guarantee that there aren't any release-critical bugs or security problems at the time of Ubuntu's release in these "universe" packages.
It would be an interesting study if someone investigated the motivation of the volunteer maintainers to fix the "universe" security problems in Ubuntu's "Long Term Support" releases. It might turn out that the volunteer-based legacy support isn't much better in Ubuntu than it is in Fedora.
Member since:
2006-01-28
Fedora has been a disaster in this sense from the very beginning.
There used to be a time when guys in the trenches formed LUGs and went and installed Linux in schools, community centers, churches and any place where a stable operating system at a low-cost was needed. This introduced lots of people to Linux and these people in turn became tomorrow's customers, programmers or admins.
Fedora has never been usable in anything resembling a serious project or desktop. And you may say, well, if they have serious needs,let them spend serious money. However, that doesn't work when you are trying to do community work, and it doesn't work in the non-profit or SMB sector.
I disagree with the majority of the previous posters. There is a very strong need for a very cheap or gratis Linux desktop that is supported for a minimum of three to five years. Ubuntu's founder here has scored a major coup by positioning the distribution as the right choice for all of the markets that I mentioned earlier.
From a philosophical and a pragmatic point of view, this is the right thing to do.
In turn, there are major benefits to providing this kind of support. This kind of support introduces Linux to anyone who is not a geek in the kinds of settings that matter: schools, offices, churches, places where lots of people will be exposed to the Linux desktop and may thus decide to run it at home or to recommend it because they have had a good first-hand experience.
Replacing a desktop every eighteen months is simply too costly in manpower and time for most "normal" people.
I am waiting for another enlightened distribution to join Ubuntu in offering three to five years of support.
Gain mind-share with the small guy and you will also win interest into your real corporate offerings.
These corporate offerings instead of being based primarily on how many years of security updates you need should be based around the idea of getting real on-site help if you have a problem. That's something people are willing to pay money for.
Security updates alone are taken for granted and probably rightly so.
Edited 2007-01-03 00:36