In Sept, Red Hat announced it would stop development of Red Hat Linux and only develop and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yesterday, they announced that RHL 7 and 8 support will be discontinued by the end of 2003 and RHL 9 by the end of April 2004.
The RHL development will continue on as Fedora (definition). It will now follow the open source development model (like Debian), though Red Hat will own the Fedora brand.
Personally, I don’t think this was a smart move. It will splinter users of Red Hat and cause some Red Hat users to defect to other Linux distros. The fuel that fed sales of RHEL was corporate geeks playing around with RHL. Unless they have tight interoperability between Fedora and RHEL, the fuel will be gone. I’m sure Red Hat was probably losing money on RHL, but it was the cake that allowed the icing, RHEL, to stand on.
We will see what happens. But, for now, I’m considering other distros.
Links:
Fedora Project
RHEL vs Fedora
FAQs for Red Hat Linux Migration
Red Hat Linux Migration Resource Center
Reason for the change
Red Hat Linux becomes Fedora – LWN
Fedora Project – LinuxInstall
Red Hat Linux Project Renamed ‘Fedora Linux’ – OSNews
Fedora Project – Freshmeat
Red Hat: Fedora Project Launched – LinuxToday
Red Hat Linux Project Merges With Fedora – Slashdot
Red Hat Linux Support To End – Slashdot