Defending the Flame of Linux Freedom

“LXF: How well do you think Fedora/Red Hat is addressing the
oft-repeated claim that Fedora is just a beta for RHEL?

“MS: I hear a lot less of that than I did four years ago. I
think the fact that we have built our community in an entirely
transparent way says the most about that, because people see Fedora
being an extreme innovator, they see SELinux get developed, they
see Network Manager get developed, they see Red Hat participate in
Xen and the work that’s been done in virtualisation, and they see
Red Hat doing stuff that’s good for all distros, which I think
gives Red Hat a lot of credibility as a technical innovator.

“Fedora stands on its own as an operating system, and it just so
happens that Fedora is upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. No one
is going to call Debian a beta of Ubuntu, but Debian is in many
ways upstream for a lot of the Ubuntu packages in the same way that
Fedora is upstream for a lot of the RHEL packages. That doesn’t
mean that one is a beta of the other.”

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