Slashdot Mirror
Fedora Legacy Shutting Down
An anonymous reader writes to pass on the news that the Fedora Legacy project is going away. The project has been providing security updates and critical bugfixes to end-of-life Red Hat and Fedora Core releases. From the article: "In case any of you are not aware, the Fedora Legacy project is in the process of shutting down. The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being re-examined. In the meantime, we are unable to extend support to older Fedora Core releases as we had planned. As of now, Fedora Core 4 and earlier distributions are no longer being maintained. Discussions... on the #Fedora-Legacy channel have brought to light the fact that certain Fedora Legacy properties (servers) may be going away soon, such as the repository at http://download.fedoralegacy.org and the build server."
You mean, how are Linux fans going to justify Red Hat not supporting the older versions of software that doesn't cost anything? Technically Red Hat doesn't even support the current version of Fedora Core. If you want support for multiple years, buy one of the flavors of Red Hat Enterprise.
Are you going to complain next that Microsoft isn't supporting Vista's beta 2 anymore? It's pretty much the same thing.
#DeleteChrome
Fedora's whole mission is pretty much implement the cutting edge and let people experiment and play with it. The target audience was inteded to be those desktop users/enthusiasts who would jump on the current release anyway, since it is free. If any business saw a distribution like Fedora and thought it a good idea to base their infrastructure on a Fedora Core release, they are now getting basically what they asked for.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, it's more an acceptance of what people should have perceived all along, Fedora isn't trying to be that kind of distribution. If you want that kind, go to a commercial vendor (RHAT, Novell) or go with something like CentOS or Debian, which have clear missions/policies that align with that sort of usage. Could consider Ubuntu, but I wouldn't be that confident in Canonical yet, but the LTS is at least a stated mission and Canonical has a vested business interest in being considered a serious business worthy option, while Fedora obviously hs no such vested interest. Similarly, I wouldn't use Gentoo or OpenSuSE in those contexts either, their missions are valid, but not in line with common business desires/needs. Debian and CentOS do, and generally end up 'boring' in the eyes of enthusiasts, and Fedora Core, Gentoo, Ubuntu's 6 month releases, etc all are generally more interesting to the enthusiast, but can't provide legacy support and the cutting edge all the time.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My question though is whether what is happening to this Fedora Legacy would not happen to released Windows versions. I have my doubts.
There are community projects that do explicitly do Long Term Support, Ubuntu 6.06, CentOS are two glaring examples of making a point of it, and Debian in practice has been that sort of distro. Gentoo, Fedora, et. al are catering to a different, more aggressive sort of mission that somewhat conflicts with the notion of legacy support (frequent releases produce too many overlaps in a long term model, having to maintain 4-5 different trees is not feasible. Ubuntu is doing a decent compromise (6.6 is long term, and they plan to do that once in a while, but still have frequent, shortly maintained releases to acheive the better of both worlds).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Unlike most people I don't reinstall the OS on my laptop every couple of months. Thanks to Fedora Legacy I'm happily running FC 3 and had no plans to reinstall. But now I think I'll have to look seriously at CentOS (RHEL repackaged without the copyrighted material like logos and such). RHEL (and thus CentOS) is supposed to be less "cutting edge" and more about stability over the long term. And because CentOS is just RHEL you know it's going to have more vitality than a community driven project.
As you point out several times in your post, Fedora is not aimed at enterprise usage. The maintenance work at fedoralegacy wasn't aimed towards the enterprise.
What you seem to be missing is that you're looking at a volunteer supported, non-enterprise effort that is closing down, and somehow comparing that to distributions that are aimed at the enterprise and have enterprise funding to support legacy updates. You also seem to somehow be comparing a distribution that issues a new version every few months with bleeding-edge additions with other distributions that are kept stable (and, those distributions are kept stable specifically because they are aimed at the enterprise).
You're not comparing apples to oranges "in some sense". You're comparing apples to oranges, period.
This is interesting. I've been slowly moving from the Unix world (Sun/Solaris) to Linux for a while. As part of that, we have been porting applications to Fedora/Red Hat. Lately though, I've been more and more impressed with Solaris 10 (and OpenSolaris). Frankly, I don't see much of an incentive anymore to run Linux on a production server. The only thing Linux seems to deliver better at the moment is x86 driver support and desktop apps. While I don't think we'll necessarily stop our efforts to create a more platform neutral set of applications, I suspect we'll be staying on Solaris for some time. Incidentally, I have no trouble receiving patch support for any of Solaris 10, 9 or 8 production servers. I like the longer support time lines that Sun offers (and much of it for free by the way).
Just to point something out.
Just because Fedora Legacy isn't running a patch service any more doesn't mean that those older FC distros are now useless.
The original source of many of those patches are the developers of the software supported by Legacy. Those developers - or other interested third parties - are likely still to develop patches. Those patches can probably be obtained and applied by sys admins who need them.
It just isn't going to be as easy as going to one place and downloading a set of patches, or getting them pushed to your system automatically.
Even on Windows, there are people running projects now that collect Windows patches, put them on a CD or in a bundle and provide a tool to automatically apply them, to make things easier for sys admins who don't want to or can't for some reason use Windows Update Service. I would expect this sort of thing to be done for "orphan" Linux distros to some degree, if it isn't already.
Obviously, as the Legacy project shows, depending a corporate infrastructure on such a service is not wise. But the Legacy situation doesn't mean every distro older than FC5 or FC6 is useless.
Also, even if CentOS goes belly up and there is NO source of RHEL other than Red Hat, well, that's business in the corporate world.
Try getting Windows (or Apple) for free. That's your other choice.
Finally, all this says NOTHING about "Linux for the enterprise". "Enterprises" expect to PAY for their software and their support - not get it free. One advantage Linux has is that you CAN get it for free if you want to and can handle a free OS. But that's not Linux's only advantage. And the other advantages are equally or more important than the simple cost of the OS in monetary terms - even if most CIOs can't comprehend those benefits.
One of the obvious points that you overlooked is that there are enough "second sources" for Linux that an "upgrade" (if not a "migration") is rarely forced. That is not the case in Windows. With Windows, you do what Microsoft says - that's it. That is not the case with Red Hat, SUSE, or anybody else.
The only thing we have here with the Legacy issue is some whining from people who didn't understand the distro they were getting or were using it in inappropriate circumstances.
The proper response: deal with it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Five years is hardly an unreasonable life cycle in large scale IT deployments. It's not laziness to avoid massive expenses - the upgrade itself, retooling config files (e.g. Apache 1.x to 2.x), recertifying hardware, porting or rebuilding software, running everything through a new QA cycle, etc. There's also issues of SLAs which may require customer approval for major software changes or incur penalties if critical systems need to be downed for the upgrade (and god forbid anything goes wrong).
Edge into even a medium-sized company and an upgrade may cost man-years of labor from several departments. You damn well better have a solid business case before you recommend an upgrade.
Red Hat is listed corporation. As such, they have to make money to their shareholders and they seem to be doing well, so far.
Huge amount of its workforce time, expertise, money and infrastructure is contribution that RH provides to Fedora Project, free OS of high quality. Everybody is free to join and contribute in many different ways, regardless of technical ability. Although decision making process within the Project was in RH hands, this is changing drastically and Fedora is close to becoming true community effort.
Red Hat made great deal of contribution to wider FLOSS community over time by releasing code, hosting projects, open-sourcing acquired proprietary code, etc.
Fedora Core IS NOT RHEL beta. It makes sense for RH to base its enterprise product on the code tested by wide user base, familiar with RH way of doing Linux.
Fedora Legacy was never RH project. Sure, RH people work on it but that is on their own time. Interest for it vanished. It does not make sense anymore. End of story.
Red Hat is not out there to screw anybody - not you, either. That's what Microsoft and their puppets are for.
If you don't believe this, do join one of the Fedora / RH mailing lists and you'll quickly find out that Red Hat employees are the harshest critics of their own work. Plenty of smart people on those lists, you may even learn something.
As for the rest, my guess is that in most cases with any medium or large business, business needs (new services, new marketing, new regulatory, whatever) are going to force doing all that anyway, regardless of what the OS vendor actually does.
That's largely a matter of software running on an operating system, not the operating system itself. With commercial software you're actually more likely to have a requirement on an older platform than a new one (plenty of apps out there are certified for nothing newer than RHEL3).
And really server software doesn't evolve all that quickly. Apache 1.x can deliver fancy shmancy "web 2.0" pages just dandy, with MySQL 4.x as a backend even.
Most of the stuff you mention is either something that shouldn't take "man years" of effort, or, in the case of porting software and QA, depends on factors outside of the OS itself and are even more likely to require changes over a five-year period in today's environments.
It should take as long as it takes. And the reality is that it is man-years of effort to do right. Upgrades in a production environment have to be heavily planned and handled with a lot of care. Regardless whether porting and QA are part of the upgrade itself, they are an added cost incurred by an upgrade cycle.
Finally, all of this stuff is a matter of IT management PLANNING. If your planning is decent, an OS upgrade should not be a make or break event. Waiting until the last minute and doing it when you HAVE to do it is how you get "man years" of effort involved.
Who said anything about waiting until the last minute? An overly aggressive upgrade cycle ensures insufficient planning. A five year upgrade cycle affords you the opportunity to start evaluation and planning early, have a leisurely pilot and test cycle, and leave plenty of wiggle room in the rollout to make sure you hit the target completion date.
Just as the best way to maintain a car is to know hoe many miles each part is certified for, then replace it BEFORE it breaks, the best way to maintain a server is scheduled upgrades - not trying to run it into the ground for five or more years.
My "car" is certified for seven years and gets regular scheduled upgrades. What you're saying is I should trade in a well-maintained vehicle that runs beautifully just because there are newer shinier carson the lot.