Red Hat has canned their regular boxed Linux distribution in order to push their customers to purchase subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There will no doubt be howls of outrage, but it’s a strategy that makes sense. Despite the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux costs more than regular old Red Hat Linux, it’s still pretty cheap compared to most enterprise products, and it will now be aimed straight at business customers who want to make sure the packages included with their distribution are stable and tested. Regular users who want to stick with Red Hat will be using Fedora, which will be better for them anyway since it will be updated frequently. The old Red Hat Linux distribution didn’t serve either master really well — it was too volatile for the enterprise and didn’t evolve fast enough for individual users. Now Fedora will serve as the test bed for stuff that Red Hat will carefully adopt for their enterprise distribution. Good strategy, I think.