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Red Hat Lays Groundwork for Fedora Foundation
rob writes " Computer Business Review is reporting that Red Hat has announced plans to hand over control of its Fedora community-led Linux development project to the new Fedora Foundation as part of a new three-pronged intellectual property strategy. "
seems like a dupe: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/03/ 1712208&tid=110&tid=106
Fedora, since its inception, was its own distribution. Redhat created Fedora to help mantain a free (as in beer) distribution based on Redhat. The official Redhat distribution will be as it has since the beginning of the Fedora project. The Redhat branded products, such as AS, ES, and WS will be the Redhat official releases. What Redhat in effect is doing is creating a division between Redhat and the Fedora project much like the division between Redhat and SuSE.
Note that the source rpm packages for all the Redhat Enterprise editions are still publicaly available - as per GPL requirements. While Redhat won't give you free binaries, there are plenty of places that will. If you're looking for Redhat Enterprise 3 or 4, try: Scientific Linux. It's basically just a recompile of all the Redhat packages with some bundled scientific software (which you can easily remove). I've got SL3 deployed on about a hundred and fifty desktop hosts and it's rock solid. --M
But Red Hat didn't remove their "personal" distro, they just renamed it "Fedora Core". They've provided a fairly robust infrastructure for supporting it.
And even though the product that pays the bills retains the name "Red Hat", it's as Open Source as any distro you can find. That's why I can download distro's like CentOS and WhiteBox that are exact clones of RHEL developed almost exclusively from the SRPM's released openly by the RHEL project.
If anyone in the OSS community is annoyed by the reoganization, it's probably because it is a little confusing. But this is it in a nutshell:
One product is a cutting edge distro for all of us to enjoy using and developing.
One product is the stable branch of an older version of the community disto that's packaged and sold with support to big corporations who gain from chosing the software.
There's nothing wrong with selling OSS. Consider RMS:
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover cost.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." - Richard Stallman
Red Hat employs developers who not only use OSS, but contribute a great deal of it back to the community for all of us to enjoy -- even those of us who don't run Red Hat distributions personally. Again, RMS:
"Red Hat's contributing to the GNU project by hiring people to write on the GNU desktop, Gnome, which is a very useful contribution."