I used Red Hat Linux from some very early release - v2 I think? - and paid for it voluntarily long before that was necessary. My employers have just completed a rebuild of our previously RHEL5/6 infrastructure on a pure Microsoft model, which is sad but was entirely justified on cost alone. RHEL has lost at least one customer and quite possibly their future. Fedora's a large part of why that happened. Before Fedora, when Red Hat led development based on a primarily commercial vision, enterprise customers were understood and courted. I don't think the complete abandonment of OpenLDAP (substituting AD-clone FreeIPA) would have happened before Erik Troan left. Fedora's development process is driven by very very young people with lofty but nebulous long-term goals and immediate goals that revolve around "looking cool" (which implies "total GUI interface") and laptop-centric models like dbus and wireless connectivity. That's a poor model for development of a product intended to compete with Windows Server 2012 - it's like the Fedora team is chasing the vision of 1990s Microsoft, at the same time that Microsoft themselves have seen the limitations of this approach and built a Windows CLI (that fundamentally isn't compatible with other systems) for the server room. We now have a dozen or so Windows servers that literally have no GUI, and expect to have more. And the big advantage of Microsoft in the for-profit world right now is Exchange+Outlook. These grotesquely lame products reign as the most desired and best understood person-to-person PC communications interface in the world, and their grip grows firmer every day. Concentrating on a modular system of calendaring, email, business card distribution, and meeting/event management (NOT an all-in-one system, don't just blindly clone Microsoft again) using open standards would be a sensible way to counter the value proposition Microsoft is offering (which, using HyperV and Windows Server 2012, is *cheaper* than using Free Open Source in a regulated industry, and all US industries are now regulated). But I don't see Fedora ever being able to make something like that, because the project's entirely driven by people who haven't worked in anything approaching a typical large business environment. The literally can't envision the needs of the high-profit customer and what really powerful organizations (in the sense of power to drive social change and create world wonders) want.