[Fedora-marketing-list] Info

[Sam Folk-Williams]

On Fri, 2006-11-03 at 11:01 +0100, Christoph Strobel wrote:
> Hello Gabriel!
> 
>         Question: since I intend, when the company will be in
>         "steady-state", to work on a free Linux distro, while
>         supporting it, would you please let me know what would be the
>         connection points, from the practical standpoint, between RHEL
>         and Fedora, compared to other free distros? I'd like to use on
>         some servers the RH supported licenses, and on others a free
>         distro, the "closest" possible to RH. Would be Fedora this one
>         (and why)?
> 
> Fedora is still widely known as the "Linux made by RedHat", this fact
> in one hand and the option to "upgrade" to RHEL without big
> differences in using and maintaining the system in the other hand is a
> good equipment for talking to your customers. 
> 

This is something I'd be careful with. Fedora and RHEL are only similar
in the sense that they are both Red Hat-based distributions. But there
is *no* upgrade path from Fedora to RHEL. In other words, to upgrade
from Fedora to RHEL you have to do a clean reinstall. That's not to say
I wouldn't recommend Fedora (of course), but you don't want to imply
that there is an easy in-place upgrade from Fedora to RHEL.

Generally speaking, we also want to move away from fedora being the
"Linux made by Red Hat". Fedora is community based and many of the
important contributions come from non-Red Hat folks. That said, I
understand that the impression is out there. This is the elevator pitch:
"What is Fedora? Fedora is a set of projects sponsored by Red Hat and
guided by the contributors. These projects are developed by a large
community of people who strive to provide and maintain the very best in
free, open source software and standards."

-Sam
> I've never used CentOS, so I can't say what the benefits of using this
> distribution are. But I made quite good experiences with using Fedora
> for smaller customers, as server- and client-os. Smaller companies are
> always happy not having to pay for their operating system, especially
> if their business isn't IT-related and their decision makers don't
> know much about software. I often hear "We have to pay for Linux? I
> thought it is free! Why shouldn't we get Windows then?", and it's not
> easy to convince them that Linux is the better choice. So starting
> with Fedora can lead them into the Linux-World at smaller costs. Once
> they are using Fedora for a while, it's not that hard anymore to make
> them switch to RHEL when their needs and their infrastructure grows. 
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Chris
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-- 
Sam Folk-Williams, RHCE
Global Support Services