Q's for senior fedora/redhat admins

[Rahul Sundaram]

laura at ausics.net wrote:

> Q1, taking into account Fedoras political and legal worries about patents
> and codecs, the stuff thats commonly used by everyone who don't care about
>  and are not subject to U.S laws, will Fedora versions in the future offer
> something like Ubuntu, where as there is a "restricted" installed by
> default repo, to get codecs like playing a MP3 or movie, or automatically
> get and install wireless firmware/drivers, detecting whats needed, and
> popping up a warning that it might be illegal to use this where you live
> blah blah blah do you accept risks click OK  and it goes and gets and
> installs whatever it is, just like ubuntu does?

Claiming it might be illegal and trying to pass off responsibility to 
end users doesn't work in US. Doing that would amount to contributory 
infringement. Users may not care but Fedora is legally based in US and 
doesn't operate in the same environment that Canonical (legal and 
commercial) entity behind Ubuntu) works. So it is not legally possible 
to do many of the things you have indicated for a US based distribution. 
Even otherwise, Fedora has explicitly no interest in supporting 
proprietary or patent encumbered software.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ForbiddenItems

There are variants of Fedora which do some of this.

http://lwn.net/Articles/311650/

> Q2, Will Fedora release a LTS (long term support) version that is
> supported for 3 years or so, just like Ubuntu.

You might consider using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which is derived from 
Fedora) or one of the free rebuilds where every release supported upto 
7-10 years.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/LifeCycle

There is some community interest in extending the lifecycle of Fedora 
itself post EOL but nothing you can use at the moment.

Rahul