LeFantome , 1 month ago

For anybody that does not know, Fedora was founded by Red Hat to be their “community” dostro. Before Fedora, there was only Red Hat Linux and it was trying to be both commercial and community. Red Hat founded Fedora to be an explicitly community distribution and then released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ). This resolved their commercial / community conflict.

Fedora is explicitly NOT an enterprise distribution. They are annoyingly committed to only free software. They release often and have short release cycles. Fedora is certainly not aimed at enterprises.

Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.

The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream. Alma has rebased onto CemtOS Stream ( which is what RHEL is also derived from ). That makes sense.

I have fewer comments on the health or future of RHEL or Red Hat itself or how much IBM. Ares about it. I guess I will say that I have never seen so many ads for it. I think revenues are at record levels. It does not feel like it is dying.

I don’t use Fedora or RHEL but Red Hat is one of the biggest contributors to Open Source. So, I hope this cynical poster is wrong. GCC, Glibc, Systemd, Xorg, Wayland, Mesa,SELinux, Podman, and the kernel would all be massively impacted by less Red Hat funding.