I have been doing some thinking about Redhat's (And mandrake and SuSE) release cycles. It was especially with reference to projects such as Fedora, which aim to provide high quality third party packages for Redhat. Are these not being stifled by the release cycles. If these projects are going to make a commitment to quality, the short release cycles shall surely hurt them. After a while, you can imagine that they will begin to ignore older releases, and leaving some people with the option to either upgrade (Not usually a great option) or remain outdated and without a source of decent third party packages.
Is Redhat working with these efforts in any direct way through maybe hardware purchases, paying people to actually package some of the software etc. I imagine this could be a chance for Redhat to actually shed some of its responsibility to provide these packages, and have this volunteer effort actually become the "official: third party source for packages and updates.
But most importantly, how does the release schedule affect a project like Fedora. Maybe I just need to understand. Also it may be nice to include the Fedora repository and pre-configured apt/yum packages so that users could be good to go after installing. This though would entail giving Fedora packages for their repository as soon as the iso's are released.