I have been using Red Hat Linux 7.x, 8.0 and 9 products for many years, so why should I switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux products?

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The traditional Red Hat Linux products have been very successful for many years, with many satisfied customers. However, they were primarily designed as a vehicle for distributing the latest open source features to developers, enthusiasts and early adopters. As Linux has matured the demand for a product that is designed for commercial IT deployments has grown, and the fast-paced Red Hat Linux products became an increasingly inappropriate fit. To resolve these issues Red Hat developed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family, which is designed specifically for commercial deployments.

For example, it has a much longer release cycle than the traditional Red Hat Linux products (12-18 months, compared to 4-6 months) and focuses on technologies for that market (for example, support for large servers). Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are all supplied with a year of support, and customers can continue to obtain support for 5 years. Consolidated product updates are provided on a regular basis, approximately 3-4 times a year. Perhaps most important, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of products has been enthusiastically adopted by leading ISVs and OEMs (such as BEA, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Sun, Oracle and Veritas) - all of whom are certifying their applications and hardware platforms with Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Meanwhile the traditional Red Hat Linux products are reaching the end of their support lifetimes (support for 7.x products ends on 31st December 2003 ). For open source and Linux development enthusiasts the new Red Hat Fedora project will focus on accelerating the development rate of open source technologies.

To summarize, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product family provides the features and services required for commercial, supported deployments, while non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings are changing to focus exclusively on the needs of the open source community.

For more detail, please see our whitepapers on migrating from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux http://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl

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