It is a common misconception that Fedora is some sort of Beta version for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux); this new video from the Red Hat News site tries to clear up how the relationship between upstream projects, Fedora and RHEL really works. If needed, I added a transcript of the audio track below (corrections welcome...)
Download this video:[Ogg Theora]
Red Hat award winning products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux are the result of Open Source development methods, but a lot of people don't understand how code makes from community to our customers.
It all starts in the greater Open Source community that we call "the upstream".
There anyone can create projects and write code; this is where innovation happens and Red Hat engineers are there from the beginning sharing ideas and collaborating on code.
The best ideas win, gather momentum and became Features.
Red Hat also sponsors a community Linux distribution, Fedora. The Fedora community continually tests and resolves issues with the upstream features then integrates them into an operating system released twice a year.
Anyone can use Fedora to see this features in action, even if they continue to evolve. At Red Hat we focus on those features that best serve our customer business needs; we dedicate our quality assurance resources to test, harden and certify this set of features to ensure enterprise level performance and interoperability.
Code that started life in the upstream community becomes part of the solutions our customers rely on to solve real business problems.
With our experience and involvement throughout the process Red Hat brings real value to our customers as the trusted leader in Open Source.
man, I understood the process, but still it does not make any clarification on "fedora is beta of RHEL", worse, it kind of harden that view: RHEL does cherry picking on what it interests, and leave others into fedora without what you called "quality assurance resources to test, harden and certify this set of features".
ReplyDeleteSorry, I did not see your point, maybe I am wrong
The point is the two distributions are independent projects, with very different goals and target audience.
ReplyDeleteFedora releases at a fast pace to integrate the latest from upstream projects, RHEL basically forks Fedora at a given time and then the "quality assurance" step in RHEL kicks in, actually marking the start for the Beta testing phase.
From there the fork is handled entirely within Red Hat and they support it for years to come by backporting patches into the original packages (so for instance, RHEL is still running a kernel based on 2.6.18).
So, before the new RHEL finish it's Beta cycle and hits the streets Fedora already integrated enough new packages that its value for the in development RHEL is nil.