Delay? Looks bad for Fedora

[Gordon Messmer]

Mark Hutchinson wrote:
> 
> The move to fedora was a mistake for RedHat.  I understand why they did it, 
> but they went too far and discarded loyal users ( some paying some not.  

There seem to be a lot of people voicing the opinion that this is a move 
to abandon the Free Software community.  If they bothered to look into 
the goals of Fedora Linux, they'd see that Red Hat is addressing the 
things we've been asking them for over the last several years.

They've created a brand that can be distributed freely.  You couldn't do 
that with Red Hat Linux.  The name was trademarked, and that trademark 
had to be defended.  As a result, cheapbytes.com and others couldn't 
sell discs branded Red Hat Linux.  They'll be able to sell Fedora Core 
discs.

Red Hat has also opened up (or is in the process of doing so) 
development to their community.  Now the people who use the product will 
also get their chance to contribute to the development process.  This is 
something that the Debian community has bragged about for years.  Now 
that it's a feature of Fedora Core, those same people are talking about 
it as if it were a drawback.

Red Hat hasn't abandoned Linux.  They're giving it wings.  Their 
programmers who previously worked on Red Hat Linux and desktop 
applications for the distribution will continue working on those 
applications (if I understand correctly).  The code will be included in 
Fedora Core before it sees RH Enterprise.  Fedora Core is not an 
official Red Hat product, but it is funded by Red Hat, and that's 
something that Debian lacks.