Fedora Blogs Going Bye-Bye?

This may turn out to be little more than a rumor, but Mark Terranova (aka markdude) posted that the Fedora blogs would soon be discontinued. This comes just a few weeks after the Fedora Talk service was retired.

Red Hat stock has seen a lot of growth the last several years. It reached a recent high of nearly $49 a share in December 2010 and has remained in the 40's all this year. It spent years floating around $20 for after rising respectably in 2005. It hit its lowest point since 2004 with the stock market crash of November 2008 trading at little over $9 a share. However, it's been climbing fairly steadily since. The only worrisome spots came when players in higher management dumped large blocks of stocks a few times. All that to say Red Hat has done well for itself and isn't exactly going broke.

Should Red Hat pay someone to maintain these projects? In both cases, the VoIP and blog, resources and value are stated considerations. They don't directly benefit the money makers - which has traditionally been the enterprise system and support contracts. Fedora is a combination sponsored and community project with several Red Hat employees concentrating almost solely on Fedora, but should Red Hat also springs for some of these community elements? Probably not - not if we want Red Hat to continue to be profitable. All we need is for Red Hat to end up on the auction block or with a for sale sign out in the front yard. We've seen where that usually leads for Open Source projects.

But it'll still be sad if the blog really is shut down on July 1 as posted. Perhaps someone will take the lead to move it to Wordpress.com or similar. Cross your fingers.

Update: Máirín Duffy has posted an in-depth explanation and how bloggers can move their blog to Wordpress.com.