[Fwd: Wikipidia - Goodbye Red Hat and Fedora]

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Dmitry Butskoy <buc at odusz.so-cdu.ru> said:
> I would prefer that Fedora would be stable enough, thus does not require 
> "continually rebuilding systems" ;)

It isn't just an issue of stability; it is an issue of long-term
support.  Fedora does not have the manpower and/or interest to support
releases for a long time (as seen by the failure of the Fedora Legacy
project).  The goal of Fedora is to get new features and technology in
the hands of developers as fast as practical, so there are two releases
a year.  There are people interested in long-term support, but not
enough to make it happen.

If Fedora tried to support a release for even 3 years, that would be 6
different releases to support, which would require a large investment in
time, additional infrastructure (to handle up to 3 times as many active
packages), etc.  Would it be nice if that happened?  Sure, but the
demand does not magically produce the manpower to make it so.

That's part of why people pay Red Hat for RHEL: Red Hat does support a
release for years (7 or 8 IIRC now).  Basically, Red Hat takes a
snapshot of Fedora, reduces it to a core set of packages they think they
can support (both now and long-term), runs it through some additional
QA, and produces a RHEL release.  CentOS then takes the source to that
RHEL release and rebuilds it to produce a compatible free release.  Red
Hat does much of the "heavy lifting" involved in supporting a release
for a long time and CentOS has their own infrastructure to support it
for free uses.

Since Fedora releases are only supported for about 1 year, servers on
the Internet running Fedora need to upgraded at least that often.  There
are a lot of servers supporting the Fedora infrastructure, and it would
be a significant amount of work to upgrade them all every year.  So it
makes sense to use RHEL and/or CentOS (which are after all derived from
Fedora) on the infrastructure servers, so the limited support manpower
can spend time doing more productive things than just upgrading servers.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.