“Red Hat’s decision to stop supporting its free Linux
distribution has caused two Canadian universities to rethink their
directions when it comes to the open source operating system.“Both the University of Toronto (U of T) and the University of
Waterloo (UW) in Waterloo, Ontario are in the process of deciding
whether to pay for Red Hat’s enterprise version or switch to other
distributions such as Debian, or Red Hat’s new free Linux–Fedora
Core 1.“‘It came as no surprise to us that Red Hat was having a hard
time selling free software,’ says Ian Howard, Unix systems
administrator, information systems and technology at UW. ‘But for
the virtues of Linux, choosing to buy a vendor-supported version
and having the overhead of administering licenses and subscriptions
and the loss of the empowerment takes away the actual desire for
using Linux in the first place…'”