Being a RH man, I’ve followed the Fedora thing with interest… one bit that pissed me off was summed up in the above Register article:
Case for the prosecution though. The support headache is being largely offloaded from Red Hat, and although Szulik says there are plenty Red Hat people involved, it seems fair to us to define their involvement as that of enthusiasts - it is not, in most cases, their day job. Developments from Fedora will go into Enterprise, so to some extent Red Hat will be getting development for free, and is throwing what’s left of the old model back into the community while it concentrates on its ROI. The issues here are more complex than that, of course, but we did say this is the case for the prosecution, right? People are going to think and say these things, and it will be something Red Hat will have to deal with.
Fedora is a GPL distro and developed in such a way, but parts of it will go into RH Enterprise and be sold on… WTF! Did Bill Gates suddenly start advising them on best practises :mad:
I don’t see any confilict with using GPL stuff in a “paid for” distro, providing the GPL parts are honoured. Ok, I haven’t ever read the GPL (or any other long winded text files) but my understanding is that there’s nothing stopping you from adding closed source software to a distro and charging for it. To honour the GPL all they have to do is make the GPL parts available seperately.
I always wondered how Redhat could provide the necessary desktop support under a free distro. I guess now it shows they can’t.
I really consider this a set back for desktop LINUX as a mainstream OS. I certainly hope that somebody picks up the gaunlet to support end user deployments.
I see this as merely a consolidation of the market. There really will only be room in the market for one desktop Linux disto.
I do think that Redhat have handled the whole thing terrible. I certainly won’t be using/recommending them again in the enterprise if they can change their roadmap so willy nilly.
For the desktop, I had never really considered RH. I had always thought of Mandrake and Suse for that since they have the reputation for easyier to understand distros. I wonder if others had thought the same and this has something to do with RH’s decision.
I do agree that they handled this poorly. Everyone who has invested time and effort in developing desktop RHL have just been shut out, and people don’t forget that sort of thing. I’d be skeptical of any RH products from here on out. They should have extended the product phase out timeline by offering support for another year before transitioning support to the community.
I for one use RH 8 as my working desktop in preference to Win2k, does everything I need.
Wouldn’t work out of the box unless you had a bit of common sense which I don’t see as a bad thing. The things I do from my workstation have common sense as a pre-requisite 
If RH turn their back on us then we will go somewhere else for software. Never got anywhere with RH support on the one occasion I did try and use it and I have bought at least three retail copies of RH.
OK whats next ?
. . . . Tosses RH CD’s into the bin