RE: RHEL 3.0 or Fedora for a 'production environment' ?

[Mike Odegard <linux odegardfamily org>]

Stable releases of Fedora or Red Hat Linux are great for production servers.

The point of RHEL versions are the paid support if you need it.
They are also certified to work with many commercial applications, such 
as Oracle, etc.

If you really want paid support, and can afford it, go for the 
Enterprise Linux.

However, if you just want community support, and little or no cost, then 
stick with Fedora, Red Hat, or other stable releases of Linux.

Note:  you can certainly download any software from ftp.redhat.com and 
use it, even RHEL SRPM's.  You would be on your own to support it.
Why bother, when you can get Fedora or Redhat via ISO images, and get 
community support.