Defining the Fedora Project

Let me put it more simply: From a RHEL development perspective, individual Fedora releases might be viewed as development milestones leading to a RHEL release but for the large majority of Fedora contributors, Fedora stands on its own and is used for other purposes like say running the #1 supercomputer in the world or powering all those OLPC systems.Fedora includes around 12000 software packages but typically includes only about 2500 or so. It is easy to miss the rather vibrant and diverse community with a wide variety of goals if you focus only on the RHEL relationship. A lot of activity in Fedora has absolutely nothing to do with RHEL whatsoever.

Since the large majority of software packages in Fedora is maintained by volunteers who have a independent interest in Fedora outside of RHEL, they are now discussing what the future of the project should be along with Red Hat employees working exclusively on Fedora or other leading edge projects. Fedora's technical development is led by FESCo which is a completely elected body of representatives. Things like release schedule, update policies etc can be revised independently by this group along with other leaders in the Fedora community.

> since when is a company required to only have one beta release?

If you are claiming that Fedora 7 to 12 are beta releases for RHEL, you are clearly out of touch with what Fedora project does. And yeah, that's 6 "beta" releases. Please be serious.

> the multiple releases of fedora that did not directly produce a RHEL release all tested things so that redhat could decide if they belong in RHEL or not.

Fedora releases in fact never produce a RHEL release. People that release RHEL produce its release based on factors that most outside contributors to Fedora neither understand nor care about.

If the question is whether RH folks do heavy lifting of Fedora releases, the answer is of course yes. If the question is whether RHEL release team take software out of Fedora to build RHEL, the answer is also yes. But, Fedora is most definitely not a beta version of RHEL. RHEL has its own beta version, before its own release. Fedora, in the meantime, continues on its own path.

It seems fashionable these days to bash Red Hat, Fedora and confess loyalty to Debian and Ubuntu. Whatever. Personally, I find it more juvenile than Apple fanboyism.