Topic: Impact of the end of RH support on SME?

[renwald]

I noticed this tidbit on newsforge today (11/3/03) -

"In an email to Red Hat Network customers, the company has announced today that it "...will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003," that "Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004," and that "Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line."

They mentioned that this news had been mentioned in the past so perhaps it is old news...  Anyway, I was wondering if anyone might know how this may impact the SME distributions (Mitel supported / unsupported editions) in the future?

[dave]

I've noticed that e-smith doesn't formally release anything about future directions, at least not here on these forums.  Can't blame them, i'm sure they don't want to reveal future strategies to their competition.  

I wonder though if they've decided what to do themselves.  If they had no advance warning, they would have been cought off guard.  If this is the case, there has probably been some interesting meetings in the past few weeks.  I'd imagine there has been a number of companies depending on the RH distribution that are in a similar situation.

As a user of the free distribution, I can only hope there's enough income from the SME Server subscription services to offset any development costs they'd incur in a to move to either the Fedora distro or some other source completely.

[Greg Zartman]

Well, I think the following makes RHs decision clear:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php