Ubuntu beats Fedora: Long-term support

The Fedora Legacy Project is shutting down. The goal of the Fedora Legacy Project was to provide security and critical bug fix errata packages for Fedora Core distributions in maintenance mode. Fedora users can no longer get support for releases older than Fedora Core 5, which was released in March, 2006. If you installed Fedora more than 9 months ago, then you need to upgrade if you want to get security updates.


People who use Linux, especially in commercial deployments, need to know that they can get security updates for a reasonable amount time. The Fedora Legacy Project provided an important service, but it was only sponsored by volunteers in the Fedora community. Red Hat decided not to provide this support, mainly because they wanted to encourage people to purchase their "Enterprise Linux" product. To illustrate Red Hat's position on this, you should read the answer to this question on the Fedora FAQ:

Why should I pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when Fedora is free? What is the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

I can understand Red Hat trying to increase sales of their products, but this is just irresponsible. Red Hat is using the Fedora community as a testing and development environment for their products. Red Hat benefits from Fedora community contributions, and they get an excellent marketing and sales vehicle to potential customers.

The lack of long-term support in Fedora is contrasted by the solid and predictable support that Ubuntu releases provide. I have posted before about Ubuntu's amazing release schedule. Most Ubuntu releases get 1.5 years of support, but periodically there will be a LTS (long-term-support) version that provides 3 years of desktop support and 5 years of server support.

It is likely that the Fedora Legacy Project will be replaced with a similar entity that provides long-term support for Fedora releases. Let's hope that Red Hat steps up to the plate and invests resources to make this happen.

Update: Christer pointed out that there will be a similar situation with Ubuntu support. Ubuntu 5.10 is supported for 1.5 years (18 months) which ends in April 2007. If you installed Ubuntu 5.10 in July 2006 (right before Ubuntu 6.06 came out) then you would only get 10 months of support. For all other releases, the minimum amount of support is 12 months if you install a version the day before a new version comes out.

The main point of this post is still true: The future of legacy support for Fedora is now unknown, and Red Hat should spend resources to make this happen.

Comments

  1. Anonymous1/02/2007 12:20 AM

    Why? Because you want it? Because Linux should be free as in free loaders?

    The lack of volunteers is proof that Fedora Legacy was no longer filling a critical need. Red Hat's deal with the community is "we'll help create a free, cutting edge distribution, but if you want long term support either pay for it or do it yourself." Red Hat has made that clear from the beginning.

    If anyone wants a free, cutting edge distro with frequent releases more or less on time, Fedora is one of several. If anyone wants a free distribution with long term support, there are pleny of other distros available but Fedora isn't one of them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous1/02/2007 4:11 AM

    As far as I can tell this was simply an announcement that the older releases are no longer supported but the Legacy project is still going. Probably not much different than an announcement we'll see soon about Breezy no longer being supported.

    I don't think its a big deal really..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tristan Rhodes1/02/2007 4:32 AM

    anonymous:

    You make a good point. I guess we'll have to see if the community can meet this need. If not, will this have a negative impact on the popularity of Fedora? I certainly think so.

    Christer:

    If you read the announcement, it says that the Fedora Legacy Project is "shutting down". It also says, "The current model for supporting maintenance distributions is being
    re-examined." We'll just have to wait and see how this all works out.

    ReplyDelete
  4. blondie1/03/2007 3:33 PM

    Hey, stop for a moment! You can't consider seriously to use Fedora in commercial/pruductive environment. It's not its goal.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Tristan Rhodes1/15/2007 3:34 PM

    For comparison purposes, I also want to document the long-term support available for OpenSuse. Based on the link below, OpenSuse gets 2 years of security updates.

    http://en.opensuse.org/SUSE_Linux_Lifetime

    This puts OpenSuse in about the same class as Ubuntu, which has 1.5 years of support with periodic LTS releases with 3 years of support.

    ReplyDelete

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