Red Hat 9.0 - The Last Red Hat Consumer Distro?

Red Hat 9.0 looks like being the last release of this Linux distro, with Red Hat the company concentrating on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the consumer distro being merged with the Fedora Project.

According to the Fedora Project website;

"The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community. "

I must admit I hadn't heard of the 'Fedora Project' until now, and the relationship between them and Redhat is likely to be similar to the one between the Mozilla project and Netscape. Still, it was obvious Red Hat wanted to get out of the retail market and it's good that they've open-sourced some of the Red Hat proprietary stuff such as the Bluecurve theme.