OK, so it's the Fedora Project, but is it still called Red Hat Linux?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 22:10, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> OK... Let me see if I have this straight.
> 
> We have an established Linux distribution suddenly shedding its
> well-established name and discontinuing regular releases.
> 

We split the original single RHL product into a product (RHEL) and an
open source project (Fedora Project). There are now twice as many
releases. Neither Fedora Core nor RHEL are the same as RHL, but both are
descendants of the RHL code. Fedora Core is not a product as RHL was,
and has none of the guarantees of a commercial product; but also, it
should have more packages and be more up to date than RHL was. RHEL has
guarantees and features much more in line with what people traditionally
expect from an OS - it is much more supportable - but also, it is slower
moving and you have to pay for those guarantees.

By using the Fedora name, we allow different trademark guidelines for
this project (so there can be third-party CD vendors, for example) and
hopefully make it clear that it is not a product you can call Red Hat
and complain about.

Perhaps more importantly, changing the name indicates that the nature of
the thing has changed. It is no longer a commercial product, has some
different technical objectives, has a different release/update process,
and has a different development model. The Fedora Project is _not_ a
renamed Red Hat Linux, though like RHEL those are its historical roots.

By clearly dividing the commercial product from the open source project,
we have the freedom to do both of them well. Of course, history will
show whether we succeed.

Havoc