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Fedora: (another) proposal for extended support

Posted Jul 16, 2009 4:26 UTC (Thu) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587)
Parent article: Fedora: (another) proposal for extended support

Let's take a not-so-wild extrapolation as to how this latest proposal is going to end up. First, some facts:

Much of Fedora development is funded by RH.
RH folks are not interested in funding a "more stable" distribution that would be a competitor of sorts for RHEL -- it has the potential to reduce their revenue stream.
Fedora is a test-bed (or if you want to be politically correct, the upstream source) for RHEL. It's in RH's interest to push out as much bleeding edge stuff as possible through Fedora, in order to quickly expose problems and have them debugged.
Fedora with an effectively longer life-cycle goes directly against the above goal.
RH likes to pigeon-hole Fedora as a "hobbyist" distribution, loudly implying that it's not suitable for production environments. It wants to keep it that way, as a contrast to RHEL.

The "longer life-cycle" proposal is going to be mulled over, and then quitely swept under the carpet.

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Fedora: (another) proposal for extended support

Posted Jul 16, 2009 9:10 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

A few things to consider:

* Majority of packages in Fedora are now maintained by volunteers

* Longer lifecycle in Fedora isn't going to reduce the revenue stream anymore than a free rebuild of RHEL itself would. The revenue model is commercial support and service agreements and not just the software itself. Otherwise, there wouldn't a chance against hundreds of free distributions, some of them with relatively longer lifecycles.

* Fedora is upstream or the basis of not just for RHEL but several other projects like OLPC or Moblin. OLPC's latest build for example is almost 100% Fedora. Whatever improvements made is pushed upstream aggressively and benefits all the other distributions as well.

* Considering point 1, even assuming what you claim is true, it wouldn't necessarily matter. Other organizations have been sponsoring infrastructure as well and all of it by policy free and open source

http://fedoraproject.org/sponsors
http://infrastructure.fedoraproject.org/csi/free-software...

The actual barrier if anything is going to be the amount and nature of the work required and people in the community willing to do that. I have signed up since the proposal seemed more reasonable this time. Let's see if there is enough momentum to take it further.

Fedora: (another) proposal for extended support

Posted Jul 16, 2009 11:38 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> * Majority of packages in Fedora are now maintained by volunteers

As was stated many times during the Fedora Legacy era just because you don't get a Red Hat paycheck does not mean you're interested in supporting old and crufty systems. If that was the case EPEL would have the same coverage as Fedora.

It's interesting that the two Fedora derivatives you list (there are others) are also not interested in old systems and try to push the envelope just like Fedora.

Fedora: (another) proposal for extended support

Posted Jul 16, 2009 12:32 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

By the virtue of a larger community of package maintainers, the agenda can be more diverse and if that community is interested in maintaining older versions, that is a possibility. The scope of the current proposal makes it more feasible than before. I think we are in terms of infrastructure, community and process in a much better state than Fedora Legacy.

EPEL is in a different boat. It is a relatively young project, many of the latest software won't build on older releases etc and not really comparable to a extension of a existing release by six months just for security fixes.