Vlogcanic

If Novell, Sun and Canonical decided to become major players in the open source and free software field it’s because Red Hat showed them the game was well worth playing.

Red Hat is the corporation behind the very successful Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution and is also Fedora’s main sponsor –Fedora being the free and community developed Linux distro from which RHEL forks itself nowadays.

Fedora was born as Fedora Core wen Red Hat discontinued RHEL’s non-commercial brother, Red Hat Linux, in 2003, and has been among the most powerful, cutting edge and respected Linux distributions from its inception, honoring Fedora’s mission: to be about the rapid progress of free and open source software.

Six Fedora Core versions were released between 2003 and 2006 and then it became simply Fedora from version 7 and onwards. Besides the change in name, the distro became available as LiveCDs or LiveDVDs instead of the older five-cd-pack installation bundle.

In some ways, Fedora is both a Linux distro and an idea. It’s influence in the Linux world is huge, as Debian’s, because Fedora’s approach to development is not to come up with stuff particular to Fedora but to contribute in the upstream projects so that such improvements are used by almost any other distro.

RHEL is based on Fedora so that Red Hat’s investment in community development pays off in the commercial product. This is the business model that caught Novell’s eye and prompted them to buy SuSE and fork it into OpenSuSE and Suse Linux Enterprise.

As most of the older and more complete distros Fedora is commonly used as a base for new Linxu flavors. Some examples:

• Yellow Dog Linux
• CentOS
• Scientific Linux
• BLAG Linux and GNU
• Red Flag Linux

Even if Fedora lost a bit of ground in the desktop arena to Ubuntu, Suse and Debian, it still remains one of the most robust, reliable, cutting-edge and respected distros in the Linux world while RHEL is, arguably, the most successful extant service distro.