Before Fedora was announced, I was about to give up on Red Hat (after using 7.3, 8, and 9, every day, all day) and begin searching for a ... ... making much more of an effort to test the builds, and find and report bugs than I ever did for previous Red Hat releases. As soon as I have time I'll probably even start fixing bugs and submitting patches. I never did that for previous Red Hat relases.
I'm sure I'm not the only one. Perhaps some people will switch away from Red Hat because of the changes to Fedora, but I'll bet that there will be a net INCREASE in users.
Torrey, you're not the only one. I have exactly the same thoughts and experiences. In my opinion, Red Hat did an excellent move of reorganizing their software offerings and development into RHEL and Fedora.
Fedora brings to community what many of us have been looking for: a distribution for "early adopters, enthusiasts and developers", as Fedora's web site says. Finally you can get all the latest and greatest for Red Hat based distribution effortlessly.
If you are running a business, you'll be considering RHEL or Fedora, depending on your budget and in-house expertise. If you are a DIY-type Linux hacker, you'll go with Fedora (or with any other Linux distribution) in production environment. OTOH, if you need certified platform with vendor support, you'll choose RHEL.
I just can't understand why some people have hard time comprehending that Red Hat is a company, which ultimate goal is to make money and create value to its shareholders. The only way to make money is to charge someone for something. In their case, it's RHEL subscription (plus training, professional services, et al.) and that keeps them in business. That'll help them to pay salaries for dozens of developers that work for Red Hat and produce Open Source software for RHEL, Fedora users and the whole OSS community.
Quoting from redhat.com: "Balance means building a successful company without sacrificing customer trust. And creating shareholder value without severing our ties to the open source community."
IMO, they have pretty well kept that balance. And if you're going to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. Some people will not like/tolerate Red Hat's move, but that's a small minority, IMHO. I'm more than happy to see Fedora being incubated by Red Hat. It's a community project, backed up by one of the largest Linux vendors, and that gives the project more leverage than anything else.
All right, that's enough opinions for today. :)