this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If Red Hat were to stop officially supporting Fedora tomorrow, can you guarantee the project will still survive?
Can Android/AOSP survive if Alphabet were to give up on it tomorrow?
Sorry to be rude, but can't you just go read the docs to understand this?
Fedora is a fork of Red Hat, the same way Ubuntu is a fork of debian. Yes, it is now singular to being its own thing. It is also not corporate controlled.
I think you've got your ordering and terms a bit confused, there. There's no forking as such going on in the EL ecosystem.
To explain it as simply as I can, as there are quite a few people mixing this up in here.
Fedora is *upstream *of Red Hat (Or RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be exact - Redhat is a company owned by IBM that does a bunch of stuff, not just RHEL).
Fedora feeds into CentOS Stream (Essentially a staging area for RHEL). This has no relation to CentOS Linux, which is dead.
RHEL is then built from CS at point releases and sold commercially through licencing.
There are distros such as Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux and possibly some smaller ones that strive to be near exact clones of RHEL (Rocky claims bug-for-bug compatibility, Alma doesn't any more as they build in a different way) - these follow RHEL's point releases, and might be considered a poor and loose definition of forking, but rebuilding is a more accurate term.
All these distros are under the blanket term of "Enterprise Linux" because it's shaped around RHEL, even though most are free. Historically this worked well, as people learned Enterprise skills using Fedora and Centos Linux which turned into careers (including for me). Then Redhat went a bit mad and that all changed.
The only similarity to Debian/Ubuntu is that Ubuntu uses Debian as a base, and builds upon it. Like RHEL, it adds commercially licenced bits to its distro and rebuilds other parts into something unique, and like RHEL, Rocky, Alma and OEL do with Fedora, it feeds back improvements and development into Debian.