Chapter 1. Introducing Fedora
| IN THIS CHAPTER
Welcome to Red Hat Fedora 5 Unleashed! Fedora is a unique Linux distribution and is the first and primary product of The Fedora Project, an open source, communitydriven project sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora is a Linux distribution available free over the Internet at http://fedora.redhat.com/. Alternatively, places like linuxcentral.com or even your local Linux user group can supply you with a copy if you do not have a good Internet connection. Fedora represents an evolution in the business direction of its sponsor, Red Hat. For nearly 10 years, Red Hat provided copies of its commercial Linux distribution, Red Hat Linux, free over the Internet. All that changed in October 2003, when Red Hat discontinued the sale and free distribution of its consumer-oriented Red Hat Linux. As the company has since its inception, Red Hat then released all its work on the freely licensed software in the former consumer distribution. The work, which was to be a new version of Red Hat Linux, was then merged with an existing Fedora Linux project and was reborn as Fedora. Red Hat now focuses its efforts on enterprise and corporate Linux-based products and services, but again, continues to make source code available for all its products that are under an open source license. Red Hat's Enterprise Linux is a series of software products aimed for corporate and enterprise migration, deployment, and use. Although all Linux distributions could be considered the same underneath because all use the Linux kernel, Red Hat takes special pains to create, test, sell, and support commercial Linux distributions optimized for deployment on multiple hardware and CPU architectures. These highperformance enhancements include hardware-tweaked Linux kernels, fail-over and load-balancing clustering, and integrated Java supportessential for mission-critical applications and production environments.
One possible reason for the success of Linux could be "best hack wins." In other words, software that works well, fills a critical need, is readily available in source form, and is distributed under a free software license (such as the GNU GPL) will quickly spread and see extensive use. The growth in popularity and widespread adoption of Linux around the world is a testament to quality, licensing, and need for Linux. UNIX enjoyed a similar rapid-fire adoption after it was distributed in the early 1970s and fulfilled user needs on a number of fronts. However, its licensing was restrictive, caused much grief in some open source communities (such as education), and continues to spawn problems to this day. Here is the bottom line: You are holding nearly $1 billion worth of software in your hands. That is one estimate of what it would cost to develop as complete an operating system, graphical interface, and related software to equal the operating system included with this book. It was not long ago that any new major project involving use of Linux by big business, government (on any level), or academia would have been big news. Today, Linux is increasingly used by IS/IT strategists for computing solutions. Linux and related open source software rule the Internet. It is the host platform of choice for traditional server operations. Linux is poised to take over the desktop, occupying the number two spot behind a monolithic software entity. Note The list of Linux projects, efforts, and partnerships reads like a Who's Who of the software industry: Amazon, Ameritrade, Borland, Computer Associates, Dell, Hewlett-Packard/Compaq, IBM, Oracle, and SAP are just some of the enterprise-level players using Linux. Linux is also a key ingredient and shares an ever-increasing portion of server hardware sales from all large vendors, such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard/Compaq, and Dell. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 362