Mascot - Blue Arrara

[Gian Paolo Mureddu]

Rahul Sundaram escribió:
> Why?

That has been the attitude from quite a bit of people, starting by the 
devs, Red Hat and others. I don't mean that Fedora is a bad system (by 
any means!! totally opposite!) it is an excellent home OS and home 
server where tasks are less critical, and due to the amount of updates 
released for it, it is a great Desktop system, but a lousy server for 
mission critical and key components on production servers (due to 
downtimes related to the amount of updates). I fought the idea of Fedora 
being relegated at first, but I've grown to understand why that is so... 
Maybe, and just maybe, we should market Fedora as an excellent home OS 
alternative (much more reliable than many others, and gives a LOT of 
home users a truly FREE [as in "gratis" and "liberty"] alternative 
platform). I'm sure Fedora would make also a GREAT corporate Workstation 
and Desktop OS, but due to its short life-cycle, it is kind of difficult 
keeping up, plus the overhead on IT staff for massive upgrades to the 
next version. Even with the extended life-expectancy of a Fedora system 
(IIRC it is now 13 months from release) it is still too short for a 
company with more than 50 desktops to maintain and migrate every 13 
months, it'd add too much of an overhead for the IT staff.

Also there's the whole "community project" side of things, and how 
Fedora is slowly evolving into being "parent" to RHEL (more than a crash 
test dummy), this positions Fedora (and I really hate to say this, but I 
certainly don't know how else to word it) much like Debian (please don't 
hate me for this), in that of the role it is taking as a community 
project, philosophy, guidelines, etc. They're too much alike in this 
regard (the /implementation/ is different, yes, but the two projects 
share a lot of common grounds). However there are some key differences 
(as well) as there are different "branches" in Debian, to which Fedora 
resembles "sid" the most, i.e. an "unstable" tree (though Fedora is 
considered to be "stable", the unstable tree is "Rawhide") I don't want 
to take much deeper this comparison between the two, because as similar 
as they may be they're also fundamentally different, and it wouldn't be 
fair for either project to maintain the comparison. The point was in 
regards to the community and the branches, and how "stable" Debian 
remains, compared to Fedora (i.e. longer release cycle for the "stable" 
tree, which is why [amongst other things] it is so widely deployed in 
servers), which is the main argument for a lot of "production 
environments" to reject Fedora in favor for RHEL or CentOS or another 
more "stable" distro, in the understanding here that by "stable" I mean 
a slower paced evolution and longer product life. Fedora typically is 
supported for the lifespan of the "current" release (which ever it is) 
for the first ~6 months of its life, and as the immediately prior 
release, during the lifespan of the next release, before the cycle 
repeats itself, which gives roughly ~12 months of support for each 
individual release (rounded at |3, IIRC). Fedora Legacy (which if I'm 
mistaken is going to be withdrawn) was supposed to give further support 
for previous releases, but for a number of factors this apparently is 
not going to happen.
>
> http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/17/177220
>
> I don't think we need to be judgmental about the role Fedora plays in 
> any end user system.
>
> Rahul

Thanks for the link, much appreciated. I remember reading this interview 
back in the day, and I know that Max is working hard in trying to erase 
the "stigmas" of Fedora, and believe me, I *do* share his points... 
Until the real world steps in... But as he himself says, nothing is set 
in stone in Fedora, and it will evolve, maybe it will do so that it may 
even be embraced in production environments (and I do believe it has 
what it takes to do so)... the question is "Do the people responsible of 
decision making for such environments agree?" I hope that in time, they 
will... maybe deploying Fedora boxes for non-mission critical tasks, etc.