I agree, Red Hat should never have distanced itself as much as it did from Fedora in the beginning. It was a big mistake, and they've mentioned that numerous times. The good news is that Fedora really started coming together with about release 3, and the community and Red Hat are working really well together right now.

I personally believe the two finest distributions out there currently are Ubuntu and Fedora (of the non-business kind). I've heard some good things about OpenSuSE, but I haven't really seen any good examples of where they've provided leadership recently, though. I'd like to hear from folks who use it though if I'm wrong.

And again, I have a pretty severe view of CentOS, one that's not shared by everyone. However after seeing the really slimy thing that Mandrake (now Mandriva) did by taking Red Hat Linux, adding KDE, and underbidding Red Hat on the Macmillan distribution deal back in 1999ish, I've become of the opinion that it's important for the community to make sure to support the folks doing the work.

Jeffrey.

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Arthur Pemberton <pemboa@gmail.com> wrote:

At the very least, RedHat's PR people, CEO, and staff within the
community all like (at least claim to) Centos. Centos may very well
may be suggested more often within the Fedora community than Fedora
itself, especially for stagnant server machines.

That said, I think people consider RedHat's "splitting off" of the
non-commercial portion way more contreversial than need be and take it
way too personally.

--

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine