Fedora release cycles: longer or shorter?

That is a product similar to Microsoft Small Business Server. One of the chief advantages that Microsoft with Active Directory is that everything is pre-configured out of the box to work well with it. That is if you have Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, Active Directory, and Exchange server and, I suppose (even though I have no experience with it) Sharepoint.

Everything is designed to work together so you can get a fairly full-featured enterprise-ish desktop/server/application system up very quickly with little hassle and relatively little training.

It's very 'easy'.

Getting a similar thing in Linux is deadly difficult for most people. LDAP server, GUI management tools, calendering, etc etc.. There are components that work and are reliable, but just don't integrate easily and there are big gaps in functionality. It's hard and it's spotty.

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Ubuntu is having a hard time gaining traction in business, and that's were the money is (since Ubuntu is trying to follow a support-oriented business model similar to Redhat). But due to the lack of application certifications and whatnot Ubuntu is not gaining traction well.

Well so far Linux is good in the server room, but in the business it has a huge perception problem about being very difficult and expensive to deploy Linux desktop solutions for the desktop. Lots of management issues and such.

So what Ubuntu should be doing, if they want to be taken seriously, is focusing on the desktop, server, and domain integration. Sure they have a nice desktop and home users use it, and Ubuntu makes a decent server, but that's not were the money is and most people who are going to be interested in Linux are going to be using and supporting software/computers professionally. They use the software they use at work and that's were most of their energy is focus is going to be targetted at.

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Well with Fedora you have things like Fedora directory server and management tools.

Samba4 is coming along. Openchange is very nice also... (not to be confused with OpenExchange) their stuff really does a good job of integrating with Microsoft Exchange. As in 'it works'. Calendering, MAPI, and all that. When trying to use Linux in a place that uses Exchange it's always a struggle and Exchange's web interface sucks big donkey. But OpenChange is working on a evolution plugin that will solve all this.

Then there are things like FreeIPA. As well as Redhat's purchase of Qumranet as well as Redhat's web-based virtual machine management system.

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If Fedora can release a functional equivelent to SBS.. were you have a server with Email, Domain controller, virtual machine management, SQL server, etc etc... and then you have a client Fedora version that tightly integrates with it. (As well as Windows client integration).. And the devil is in the details.. like you can allow user access to a SQL server on the server so they can play around with OpenOffice.org's DB integration.

Like a Fedora Re-spin or whatever it's called.

I think that sort of product would be met with massive interest.

If the a average admin, who is used to managing Windows systems, can get a old box out of the closet, install "Fedora Server" on it, and then dual boot "Fedora Client" and get a domain up and running with email, VM, and all that good stuff with minimal knowledge of Linux then that's a huge advertisement for Redhat and Fedora.

It doesn't need to be perfect and make no illusions about the cutting-edge nature of this sort of thing, but if you give people something that people can really sink their teeth into then users will like it very much and it's not going to be something that Ubuntu will be able to duplicate any time soon. (since most of the software I described isn't packaged by Debian yet..)