All -

As some of you may know, I have recently taken a position as an assistant
vice president in the Linux Design and Engineering group with Bank of
America.  I have to make very clear - I am saying this as a private
individual.  My opinions and experience here do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of my employer.  Anyway, today we had our weekly conference call
with Red Hat.  The call ran short and at the end the Red Hat technical
account manager asked if anyone had any questions.  On impulse, I asked what
the real scoop was with Red Hat and Fedora - that there have been a bunch of
doom-sayers saying that Fedora isn't *really* supported by RH and that RH
has abandoned non-enterprise users.  The answer I got from an internal
engineer and the technical account manager was very reassuring, and they
told me I could tell anyone who was interested.

Much if not most of the "heavy lifting" in building Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL) is done in Fedora.  RH engineers develop and release to the Fedora
tree following Linus's own instructions:  "Release early and release often"
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04
.html).  This allows both the considerable resources of Red Hat *and* the
Fedora community to put eyes on the software.  Through both venues the
packages are stabilized and then frozen and included in RHEL.

I don't see how there is any significant down side to this.  The community
gets a free, professionally built distro (Fedora), enterprise computing
shops get a supported, commercial distro (RHEL) and the parent company is
able to keep the lights on and pay people to improve Linux.  How about it
folks, can we quit this insane internal squabbling and just cut Red Hat a
break?
-- 
Regards,
Thomas Cameron