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Red Hat Promises A More Vibrant Fedora
loki99 points out a CNET story about the direction Red Hat's development has taken (and changes in the wind), writing "Michael Tiemann, vice president of Red Hat, admits that after exclusively concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in recent years, they left those 'early adopters' behind. 'It insulted some of our best supporters. But worse, we lost our opportunity to do customer-driven innovation.' Tiemann said." The recent Boston FUDcon (mentioned in the linked article) is one example of how the company wants to revitalize non-corporate interest.
Any company, even one as evil and condescending as Microsoft, needs to engage their customers. It is just a rule of business that if you don't listen to your customers they will leave you.
Apple computers, under the steady hand of Steve Jobs is magnificent in this regard. They seem to be leading the market in certain directions, but it is more that Steve Jobs is tuned into the customer zeitgeist that he "leads" the customers by following them and providing them with what they want.
RedHat seems to have finally learned this lesson. After throwing out a lot of goodwill by leaving their best customers in the dust (by bringing out the largely incompatible Fedora distro), they seem to have caught on that they need to be where their customers are, not where they want their customers to be.
My only experience with Fedora came in the form of FC2. It was the closest thing to Linux ME I have ever seen.
The problem Red Hat has had is not that Fedora is slow on the bleeding edge, but the group seems to be ignoring user request for simple feature fixes [citing a 6 month release schedule]. On the other hand by distancing themselves form free (as in beer) distros, RH has begun making money and gaining mindshare in the business world. RH can loose all they want in the desktop end, but as long as they keep the workstaion/support contract end alive and well they will continue to make money.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Oh man, Red Hat were warned about this two years ago. Every man and his dog knew this would happen, and said so openly here on Slashdot. Now suddenly, RedHat have figured this out. Me thinks they are slow learners. I'm still running the last version of RedHat before this debacle occured, and when I can muster the effort will leave my many MANY years of RedHat behind in favour of Debian.
I'm gonna git you sucka!
I hate RedHat's distro version upgrade path. Live upgrades are much easier now with yum, but it can still be difficult. Usually much has changed, requiring some packages to be manually upgraded and others forced.
They should get rid of the distro versions all together, no more Fedora Core 1, 2, or 3, just Fedora. I don't see why they can't just push out new packages and make a refresher set of cd images every 6 months or so. Then new installations won't require 600mb of patches right off the bat and everyone will always be and stay current when they update with yum. No more downtime with inter-distro cd or botched live upgrades.
It's been years since I switched from RedHat to Debian at home and although there have been improvements, it's still nowhere near Debian's wonderful system.
If there's one thing I will always regret, it's going with RedHat way back when. Pain in the frick.
And to add to that, I believe that all the Windows IT professionals that continue to ignore Linux will end up on the you know what end of the stick.
.com era and won't leave.
The trend towards Linux systems has been steadily going up, never down, and there's no sign of slow down.
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
That's my problem with RedHat as a whole.
I ran Fedora for a while. It was OK. But then another Fedora release came out, and there was no supported upgrade path--you had to reinstall again from scratch from a CD.
Well, I used to have to reinstall from scratch every six months when I ran Windows. That's why I switched to Linux. I want to install from scratch from CD exactly once, barring disk failure, and then have updates flow down automatically.
So now I run Debian and Gentoo. If RedHat want to get me running Fedora, they'll have to fix the upgrade problem. Getting rid of RPM would be a good start.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Another example of substance versus form. Here, it seems they want to attract more potential buyers - not fix the problems in the OS, but make it look like it doesn't have them.
...put Axel Thimm on the payroll. If it wasn't for him I, for one, wouldn't be running Fedora.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
.... when Mandrake 7.1 hit. Then, of course, I found gentoo and have been compiling ever since.
IMHO, the only reason to run RedHat is because a particular proprietary vendor (such as, say, Oracle) supports only RH with their proprietary app.
I think it was deeply stupid for RH to drop their power-user distros, and Fedora was never a legit substitute. Methinks RH's strategies gave SuSE a golden opportunity to expand in the US market, and probably prompted Novell to buy SuSE.
The next set of infrastructure servers that need to run any kind of proprietaryware, I'm probably going to be recommending SuSE/Novell..
I upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 2 to Fedora Core 3 just fine. Put the FC3 cd in, boot it, and select "Upgrade", I did the same thing from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2. I even upgraded Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 1. What's the big deal here? It's worked exactly like this since I started on redhat in the 5.2 days, and probably before that too, but I didn't use RH before that version.
On other systems I've even done upgrades on Fedora Core with YUM.
Also, please tell me what's wrong with RPM. Don't bring apt-get into this, cause RPM isn't a repository installer. If you want to talk software repository based install, you need to compare dpkg to RPM, and apt-get to YUM.
I'm tired of people saying RPM sucks, and then comparing RPM to apt-get. I know, it's the "cool thing" to make fun of RPM.
Before Red Hat 6.0, I thought it was a mess. When 6.2 was released, I migrated all of my systems to it. By the time Red Hat 9 was released, I had all of my systems under Red Hat Network contracts.
I felt alienated by their decisions; stability is important to me, but as our customers demand more features we need the updates to the kernels, the newer software packages, the newest hardware support. I was willing to pay to stay on the cutting edge, but unwilling to pay for stagnation.
I'm currently happy with Fedora Core 3 and am glad that Red Hat is supporting that project. They originally had to earn my support and respect and I hope I can trust them with that again in the future.
Not sure if any of the marketing folks at Red Hat are reading this but here's my $0.02:
We use Fedora Core 3 in my workplace on about 20 workstations, and I have called Redhat on two separate occasions to discuss "upgrading" to RHEL. Both times I've spoken with a sales rep, I was seriously underwhelmed by their presentation.
Apparently there is no cross-grade (upgrade?) path from Fedora to Enterprise, and I got a real lukewarm sales presentation from the RH reps. Seems silly not to offer some assistance migrating from Fedora to the enterprise product.
Fedora also has lots of features that RHEL doesn't have in the current version, some of which are quite nice or even ones I might not want to live without. The Evolution Calendar for example, is broken in FC2, and RHEL3. FC3 has a newer version of Evolution in which the calendar works perfectly.
Since I'm going to be doing all the work of keeping patches up to date, and can get newer features and more bugfixes from Fedora, we're sticking with it for now. Either that or move to CentOS.
Sorry, Redhat. I've used and liked your distribution since about version 5 but you folks really need to learn to listen to your customers and supporters.
red hat trying to win back non-corporate users through something called FUDcon *is* ironic -
one would expect that winning community trust would not be done through FUD, thus making this ironic [unlike, say, 'rain on your wedding day'].
We just need need a Fedora Advanced Server 3.0, or 4.0. We need something that exactly mirrors a complete Advanced Server installation like whitebox linux. Even better the kernel ideally should be the same compilation that will be used in the next AS.
We dont need a stripped down, rebranded disro "here this is for you" linux. Just something that will play with all the redhat-certified software and apps out there.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Fedora is useless to me because there is no backing from the 3rd party application providers. It's treated as a strictly experimental distro and nobody supports it. When RH dropped went to their pricey paid support only model I went to SuSE.
With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.
Red Hat as always continues to develop more kernel,gnome, and freedesktop code then anyone else. They pay the salaries of some of the greatest minds in the linux community and are mostly responsible for where Linux is today. Give them a little slack... Fedora 1 is RH10, same engineers and process, they just stopped asking for money.
Regards,
Steve
There is no reason for you or the CentOS guys to be one bit pissed about this. The letter from RedHat's legal team was very polite and the demands made were very simple: they just wanted perfect clarity on the nature of CentOS and RedHat Enterprise Linux. They did not want CentOS taking Enterprise clients away from their products. I think this is completely fair as the CentOS team USES the RedHat sources that were given to the community by RedHat to build their distro. BTW, I run CentOS on all my servers at work, so I have no axe to grind with the CentOS guys.
It's nice to see that they acknowledge their mistake, years after the fact. I could have told them at the time, you know.
I'd been using Red Hat since about 4.0 or so (not RHEL 4.0 -- Red Hat 4.0); every time a new major release came out (which tended to suck, as all the Red Hat X.0 releases did) I'd try it, because I'd be able to get free CD's from my university. That university? NCSU, where some of the founders of Red Hat got their start.
I did move away, because I got frustrated with the bugginess, and with rpm and its complete lack of dependency handling. This was around Red Hat 7.2 or so, I think. I tried upgrading my installation entirely with rpm, which I would not recommend to anyone. I understand they have better tools for this now, but at the time I switched to Gentoo and never looked back.
However, I never stopped installing Red Hat on some machines, to try it out, and for others to use. I'll be the first to admit that Gentoo isn't for everyone. I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old box for a little fileserver, shortly before they suddenly discontinued support for it. I've always appreciated their network install feature, and that was a factor in doing it.
Soon after, I tried out FC1 on another machine--I was unthrilled. They broke binary compatibility, and discontinued the top used and recognized Linux distribution for *that*? I bet Microsoft, SuSE, Novell and IBM all sent them a nice big Christmas card that year.
So, to Red Hat; a note from one of your former enthusiasts: too little, too late. Maybe if you shape up your act, you'll get a share of the next generation. But you won't get a lot of us back, for a while. Hopefully you'll learn from this, and not go the way of the SCO (or Corel either, for that matter).
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Trust is a terrible thing to waste. RedHat cannot
be trusted to continue support of their (largely
orphaned) client OS. Because of that lack of
trust, I have abandoned any thought of using their
server (RHEL) product, also. When the wool was
pulled off from my eyes, other linux distributions
that can be used as both client & server, and can
use a generic kernel, stated to make more sense.
Given the improved stability, why go back?
I really appreciate the effort that a lot of folks put into Fedora. In fact, I think I started testing it out around FC1 test1. Everything works great here.. on multiple boxes. And if I need help..since I live on freenode, I can ask in #fedora ...generally nice folks.
Look all flames aside. I've been using Linux for my workstations, home, etc, for 6 years, and Fedora has never let me down.
Mod this how you see fit. Peace
FC1 -> RH10, FC2 -> RH11, FC3 -> RH12.
:-( ) transparency is morphing into allowing community involvement.
RHEL represents an additional 'feature' (long term support, etc) above and beyond what was ever offered for Red Hat Linux.
The Fedora bits really truly are Red Hat Linux. We don't sell them in a box anymore, but one of the major reasons was that stores tended to have really ancient versions. It made money, but it also had people getting bad impressions of Linux. Most people actually using Red Hat were downloading and burning ISOs anyway (I'm sure most slashdotters were/are in that category).
Most engineers inside Red Hat do most of their daily work on Fedora. We have Fedora deadlines, Fedora freezes, we work to stabilize Fedora, add features to Fedora, etc. Fedora dominates our working lives.
That the RHEL product is occasionally forked off Fedora and stabilized even further than Red Hat Linux ever was gives Fedora yet another feature: more money for Red Hat to hire engineers, who once again spend most of their time working on Fedora. Everyone wins.
It is regretable the name change caused so much confusion in the community. Fedora isn't and wasn't Red Hat abandoning Red Hat Linux. The names RHL and RHEL were too similar. Additionally, RHL was a Red Hat trademark that had to be protected and would have restricted redistribution in ways that aren't a problem with the name "Fedora". Name change + more community openness != RH abandoning Fedora. We didn't communicate this well. We suck!
In fact, the change from Red Hat Linux to Fedora *added* a great new 'feature' to RHL/Fedora: greater community transparency. Essentially all Fedora development is done on open mailing lists, etc. Gradually (far too gradually
As to how slowly this transition has gone... well, its frustrating. Most engineers inside RH are frustrated by it too. The good news is that the CVS servers are about to go public. Took far far too long, but once again Fedora is *STILL* miles ahead of where Red Hat Linux was in terms of community involvement, AND it has more Red Hat engineering hours going into it than Red Hat Linux ever did.
Anyway, we market and sell Fedora differently, and we support it differently (but most slashdotters never used RH support anyway since they were downloading ISOs) but from an engineering/release engineering perspective... Fedora IS Red Hat Linux. Isn't that what most of ya'll care about? Yes, I know there will be people here who were using supported RH9 in an enterprise context, and we did screw up that transition, and I'm truly sorry about that. But as a percentage of slashdot readers who were using RH9, its very small.
-Seth
Let's see: what happens if one of your servers dies? It could be fire, it could be a motherboard failure, it could be anything.
How are you meant to re-install RHEL4? The same way you re-install for disaster recovery. Because you have such a plan in place, don't you?
You talk about ENTERPRISE. Well, enterprise to me is not just on the vendor side. It's on the customer side as well. Reinstalling any RedHat-based system doesn't take much if you use kickstarting. RH provides plenty of documentation and hosts an extremely useful mailing list for that. If you are not taking advantage of Kickstart, it is nothing but your fault.
Enterprise users are ready for the worst. They have disaster recovery plans, they do drills, they plan for increased availability through some redundancy, they perform rolling updates. Do you do all of that? I'm sorry, but throwing a lot of money at Red Hat or anyone else won't automatically make you "enterprise".
That said, I am not convinced that a transition will be that fatal. You severely underestimate the effort involved in "managing things like config files changing", but still I doubt you'll have anything that can't be solved with a little manual work - ask them for help, if it still doesn't work.
Then there are arguments for a clean reinstall. RHEL4, for example, will format ext3 partitions using the htree extensions, which speed up considerably performance when directories have a large number of files. You could do almost the same thing on an existing filesytem, but you need to unmount it, set the dir_index option and run a fsck with the -fD switches.
"That they were quite willing to drop their long term customer and community base when they thought we were no longer an asset should be noted by those chosing to use their products."
;-)
Pft. I wish all the people posting crap like this could see inside Red Hat. Virtually all of our engineering work (with the exception of some dedicated people doing backporting of features as per enterprise requests for RHEL... e.g. the reason why RHEL3 already had the most desireable kernel 2.6 features despite being 2.4 based) goes into Fedora (and before that Red Hat Linux). It always has. It always will.
As always, Red Hat continues to increase its engineering resources. Far far more work goes into a current Fedora Core release than ever went into a Red Hat Linux release.
There was never a magic change of heart when we realized we were deserting the Linux community. There was a tragic, stupid, and avoidable communications fuckup. We probably should have renamed RHL -> Fedora at a different point than RHEL appeared. But anyway, Fedora isn't and never has been abandonware, or our "second best effort".
Ironically, one of the things Red Hat, as a company, has been bad at is pimping itself to the community. We do tons of the "shit work" that keeps Linux going (who do you think pays for most of glibc, gdb, gcc, a huge chunk of the boring work in gnome, lots of upstream kernel work, etc etc) but fail marketing our efforts to get m4d pr0pz. Red Hat engineering has always prided itself on doing most of its work upstream instead of maintaining large patch sets in-distro (which most companies haven't done, and still don't do). The day we don't, you'll hear Alan Cox screaming from inside Red Hat
-Seth
When Linux IT jobs begin to out-number Windows IT jobs, it could even bring Information Technology as a viable career choice, one which is not filled with underqualified people that got in during the .com era and won't leave.
And for some reason, human nature will radically alter and the Linux IT world won't be filled with underqualified people hoping to make a buck too?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Fedora and RedHat to me is annoying - I can't bring myself to use it professionally. It changes too frequently and is poorly supported in my opinion, never fix the problems, always upgrade the packages to move the problem somewhere else. Right now I still have machines running RedHat 7.3 running updates on the fedora legacy project. (There are legacy projects to keep the older RedHat's and various Fedora Cores alive because people hate upgrading a working system every 5 minutes.)"
..which is included in Fedora Core.
It's more like every 6 months, and if you have to manage too many machines for that to be comfortable, maybe a free OS isn't right for you.
"RedHat died the day up2date stopped working for free."
It's still free in Fedora Core.
"...with up2date replaced by yum."
"Please do what you can to support CentOS, as this is what RedHat was for all of us since what, Version 3.x?"
As someone who's used every release since 2.0, this is really perplexing. RHL was always a low-cost system with a high amount of potential for getting things done. I tended to buy the major releases as a show of support but otherwise downloaded the images for expediency. It was always at least in my interest to keep up with releases--most of the software I cared about was either included, written by myself, or written by others who also kept up with RHL releases. Being that they were 6 or so months apart as well, I know I've lost very little, if anything, in the transition to Fedora Core. All that's been lost is the cachet that the name Red Hat brought to the distribution--the bits are the same, and for right now the people assembling it are the same.
You seem quite focused on the cost of full support being unacceptable above everything else.
And "Red Hat" IS TWO WORDS.
For me the problem never was the change to Fedora. I used FC1&2, and you could tell from the two that they were just following RH8&9.
.1 is better, and .2 .3 rocks" RH8,9, FC1,2, were all really all .0. They changed too many things inside every time, and broke a lot of apps. (think NPTL, KDE, SELinux, Xorg, a huge ton of kernel patches [1], and so on)
The problem is that RH8&9 were in no way comparable to the RH 5.X, 6.X & 7.X i used before:
- i was accustomed to the ".0 is shitty, but
- why the hell did they choose YUM ? this thing was a big load of sh**. the only first useable version of YUM is the new 2.1 lines. to me it really looks like the NIH syndrom (well, ok, it was yellow dog's system, but the development changed at all with the involvment of RH). so i know there were arch support problems with APT, but they could have helped the APT guys with that. and of course there's also URPMI, that works great too.
- support, combined with no "online upgrade path" through, precisely, YUM. this is big issue. you have to download and burn CD every time. it just plain sucks (on a sidenote, i live in France, where bandwidth costs nothing, but CDs/DVDs are quite expensive because of an (in)famous tax for "protecting" musicians). and anyway, there are a lot of machines i do not want to upgrade every 6 months or so. i tried to go fedoralegacy for a while, on a 7.3, but the updates are coming slow, and while it could be ok for a desktop or even server behind a good firewall, for non-critical jobs, i'd never recommend it as firewall or mission-critical internet server.
- the price for RHEL. it's madly expensive. unaffordable for a home user or a small company.
so now i don't use any RHEL/FC. i have debians[2], a mandrake, few WBELs, and even an OSX. and i won't go back.
[1] i don't know what they did with these patches, but in FC2, around 2.6.8, they introduced something that just prevented my old loki games from working. this being a wife's requirement, i had no choice but using a 2.6.7, and then changed to Mandrake, on which everything works like a breezes, despite its 2.6.10.
[2] actually Debian isn't very much a better option. these guys f*cked up their distro as well. now hardcore geeks prefer gentoo, and for most "normal" users/geeks, their stable is just too old. didn't try any Debian-based distro, though, but heard some were great.
I use FC3 as it's seems the best GNOME 2.8/project utopia desktop at present, but the work on Ubuntu Hoary looks so promising it might make FC3 redundant .
I anyone out there using the pre-releases of Hoary? Are they usable yet?
I have to admiit that we have switched almost everything off of Redhat and over to SuSE now, but here is what our company wants.
We want Redhat Enterprise with no support but the ability to download updates with up2Date. We want this not as a lease but we want to own the product. The unsupported version of Enterprise would cost around $60 (for the media) and could be loaded on as many machines as you wish, but the RedHat up2date serverice would cost a small fee for each server. Say around $50/year per server. Specifically you could buy a certain number of "active" servers in up2date and then actually have more, but you would have to switch servers in and out of the active pool. This allows companies like ours to have a development, testing and production environment without having to spend a fortion on the OS.
We want to be able to buy a support contract with you that has a certain number of calls. An example is that we could call 10X for $1,000 a year. That would make our management happy. If we don't buy that contract then the calls could be something like $400 a call. If we buy something like 50 calls then the price should go down.
Basically what I have just described was RedHat 7.1. It was supported by Oracle and other 3rd party vendors. We want that back and Fedora isn't it. You have forced us to look at things like white box linux (good product), and eventually switch to SuSE (great product, but the registration is a bit odd and the updates have caused problems).
Hope this helps. You have a great product and a great individuals working for your company. You just made a huge mistake and it needs to be corrected.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Oh please, that is such wank. The guy said that for some people who have apps or hardware not compatible with Linux, they should use Windows instead. Guess what? I agree with him! People who point out the obvious truth that Linux does not work out of the box for most people are not heretics, they're just being rational.
I still can't walk into a random computer store, as far as I know, and buy a $20 boxed DVD with any kind of Red Hat Linux on it. This is bad.
Why is it bad? You can download it for free. Given the huge costs involved with setting up boxed sales I'm not surprised they dropped it. Not many people buy operating systems in boxes.
more importantly, we could always recommend the latest bits to newbies without any download hassle.
If you were doing that you were being irresponsible. The volume of updates that all major distributions push today means it's not feasable to use Linux on dialup and stay secure at the same time.
But incremental breakage is just a lot easier to manage.
Not to most people. Most people want to be able to read a review of the next Fedora, see "it breaks stuff" and avoid it until they iron out the problems. They don't want to do an apt-get upgrade and find a few hours later they've been locked out of their system by a busted PAM upgrade.
Ok, I normally don't respond to myself, but I thought some other things.
Stop the war with Sun. You may be gaining marketshare away from Sun, but you are gaining far more from Microsoft. Sun is a competitor with a small fraction of the total I.T. world. You could crush them out and still only have s small fraction of the I.T. world. Yet you could gain say 10% of Microsofts world and be much larger than Sun.
Next on that same topic. Start shipping Suns JVM + Tomcat with your systems. Set us the system so a Java developer can hit the ground running. Also allow us the way SuSE does to get the Nvidia drivers and other things that we have to agree to a license to. I can't tell you how nice it was to see all that with SuSE (JVM, Tomcat, Java) and wonder why the RedHat guys kept telling me they "couldn't" do it. It now appears that they didn't want to do it, not that they couldn't do it.
So in short. Sun is ok, Microsoft is your enemy. We need a way during the install or update to get proprietary software loaded if required by us (the client).
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Look, I have nothing against the CentOS guys, but ...
If everyone should starting to use CentOS instead of RHEL, RH (the company) will die. Someone has to pay the bills. I believe this will have it's impact on both CentOS and Fedora. Because they both need RH.
The Fedora Project would be a car without engine.
We would have to master our Fedora boxes as a Fred Flintstone.
A distribution just have to fit the needs you have.
If you're quite a self supporting linux freak, CentOS will do.
I dont use RHEL, but I hope they deliver a good support. That's what it's all about.
Preserve stability in all domains.
About updating: You can't perform a kernel update without rebooting, even not using yum or apt-get.
So, you could as well update using CD when it's necessary.
Alternatives are welcome, in case they perform better or give RH a drive to perform better.
Fedora was a PR disaster, but at its heart, technically, Fedora is still quite an OK distro.
None of the ones I've tried (Mandrake, Ubuntu, Debian) are really any better (some things work better and some worse) and their yum/rpm combination works really well now. I find that in general Fedora is pretty much the usable latest-and-greatest, usually in need of some debugging but with versionning present. Right now it's udev, SE-linux, making USB work right and other assorted bits.
Fedora is still 100% Free, which isn't true for many other distro, and they push both Gnome and KDE, trying to make them work better together, which is the right approach. Under which other distro would you get Inkscape (gnome vector drawing app) and Scribus (kde DTP app) working so well together ?
Myself I would be happy to play the debugger to some extent, in exchange for functionality and responsiveness to problems. So far I found that it is possible to get stuck for long on little problems (for me it was syncing problems with my Zire 71, a recurring nightmare. No sooner was it fixed that a new release made it impossible again). The RH engineers are pretty good at giving an answer, but not so great at fixing the problems in the current distros.
What RH needs to do is slow down the pace of Fedora just a bit and maintain the distro they do have instead of replying things like "wait for FC(n+1), it will be fixed then". Right now this is the stock answer if things get sticky and this is not really acceptable.
Perhaps instead of forcing a new distro down the throat of users every 4-6 months they should move to a 9-month schedule which would insure people would only have to upgrade every 18 months or so, instead of every year right now (FC releases are only supported for 2 releases by RH, and legacy support hasn't really kicked in). Either that or they should support 3 releases at the same time instead of only 2.
I've found that by the time the distro is abandonned by RH it has only been running well enough for a few short months, and that if you want to move to a distro which will be supported for a while you have to move *two* distributions ahead (i.e FC1 to FC3), which is a bit risky, as RH makes significant changes along the way. Packages disappear, new ones come in their place (or not). You have to relearn how your distro works in non-trivial ways and you don't have much time to learn.
This is a poor way to reward all the users who've been doing all the free debugging for them, I reckon.
On the other hand it is very nice to see the pace of (positive) change in Linux. There is simply no comparison in functionality between RH9 and FC3.
People don't seem to get it! It is obvious and Red Hat has talked around this issue but the facts are right there staring you in the face. Red Hat decides the direction, feature set, and development of Fedora. Anything outside of what will help sell the next version of RHEL to corporate america is outside the development of Fedora. Where is the QA and beta testers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
It is you! You are the ones who are being used to QA and beta test the next version of RHEL so that they can later rebrand Fedora Core X as RHEL version X and sell it for X number of dollars. The next step is for you to start all over again with the next version of Fedora, working hard to provide free labor to Red Hat corporate.
If you really want to be part of a community distro. I mean a community where the contributions are a two way street. I would adivse you to choose another distro.
Why would anyone want to do free QA and beta testing to help Red Hat's quarterly financial reports? Red Hat should hire and pay a larger QA and beta test team for RHEL and open up a truely free community distro where people outside of Red Hat corporate can participate ans developers, maintainers, and most importantly VOTE/choose the direction of where the next set of features will be developed for the next version of Fedora.
Until then, this is not a community distro of Linux. Simply a misuse of the Free and Open Source community resources for the financial gain of one company.