Red Hat is dead, Long live Fedora

If you're a Red Hat user, then you should know by now that, unless you're an "enterprise" customer, your distribution will reach it's official "end of life" by April. Apparently, Red Hat feels that too many people are running "serious" servers without paying enough money for the privilege. So they're dropping their consumer distribution of Linux, expanding their enterprise offerings, and sending the poor folk over to join the Fedora project.

Well, ever since that bit of information sank through my skull I've been trying to figure out what to do about it. At first I assumed that I'd go with Red Hat Enterprise linux, but whoa! Look at them licensing costs! I spent a little time today figuring out what it would cost (in license fees only) to switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on all the machines I manage. The result wasn't pretty: $8000 per year. And that doesn't include support, but just the Red Hat Network service, for which I currently pay $800 per year on the same servers. I decided that perhaps this "Fedora" thing was worth looking into.

So I've just finished installing Fedora Core 1 on my IBM X31, and I must admit I'm very pleased so far. There are the minor things: everywhere you look, the user interface has been tightened, cleaned up, and polished. Then there are the major things: Fedora Core 1 feels a lot more responsive then Red Hat 9 did. All in all, I haven't run across any reason why Fedora Core 1 couldn't be easily considered Red Hat 9.1. In fact, that's just how I'm going to treat it. In the next six months I'll be putting Fedora Core on all my Linux boxes, and moving from the Red Hat Network to yum or apt.

Thanks, Red Hat, for encouraging me to seek out the "free" in Free Software!