Many people’s first experience of Linux will have been with one of the earlier Red Hat releases. Mine was Red Hat version 5.2, or thereabouts. Although on most systems I now use Debian, Red Hat is still very well known.
Except that, officially as of today, a press release states that they will be discontinuing the non-commercial arm. In other words, “Red Hat Linux” will cease to exist, but “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” will live on.
Technically, the old Red Hat Linux will continue as something called the Fedora Project, but I suspect that may not be as popular as the old Red Hat, especially when various other distributions, particularly Debian, have a more certain future.
Time to install Debian, folks. A couple of legacy systems at work still run various Red Hat Linux flavours, up to about as recent as version 7.3 – no more updates will be provided for these systems after the end of 2003, so a migration away from Red Hat will be in order. Just as well – I was wondering what to do with all my copious free time.