lwn article on the death of Fedora Legacy

[Matthew Miller]

<http://lwn.net/Articles/204722/>

This is subscriber-only content for two weeks, but the gist is: there's a
whole lotta unpatched vulnerabilities in FC4. Can we really pretend this is
an ongoing concern?

I know that personally I haven't been able to contribute the amount of time
I'd like to make this succeed. But I have a full-time job and a young child,
and am mildly active in umpteen other projects. Legacy support is hard work,
and really needs two or three full-time workers to be a success. It's
tempting to blame the lack of volunteers, but this sort of project works
best if there's a solid base. 

When Jesse Keating worked at Pogo, that was largely true, but with his
duties at RH and with his new kid, it doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
I'm sure this is not Jesse's fault -- there needs to be commitment from
above, and that's clearly not the case.

I think this is really unfortunate, because it makes a big gap in the Fedora
ecosystem. This will be largely filled by migration to RHEL-rebuild distros
like CentOS, which is well and good (and particularly painless from the
end-user point of few) but bad for Fedora. 

Without a functioning lifespan of over a year, Fedora is only practically
useful as an enthusiast, bleeding-edge distro. That's only supposed to be
_part_ of its mission.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>