During my RH300 course, my instructor mentioned that RHEL 6 is likely to come out sometime Q1 2010. I wanted to know more about it, so I hit Google, and came up with some interesting results.

This post over at linuxquestions.org starts out innocently enough – someone asks for an expected release data on RHEL 6. A poster named lazlow who appears to be a RH or Fedora dev gives a few interesting tidbits:

• RHEL 5 is based on Fedora Core 6. No wonder it feels a little long in the tooth!
• RHEL 6 was intended to be based upon Fedora 9, but it had too many bugs to even be considered.
• Since the Fedora development has been driven by the community, the focus has shifted towards new features. I’ve seen this before in community driven projects. Unless devs are motivated either via cash or fixing the bug helps their situation, no one wants to fix bugs. New features are more fun to work on.
• To solve the problem, RedHat didn’t take the project out of the community’s hands, they paid their own devs to fix Fedora bugs. This is very commendable behavior for a big corporation, and I feel it’s a win/win for RedHat and the community.
• It looks like RHEL6 will be based upon Fedora 11.

Now, this could all be someone spouting off about things they don’t know anything about, but it looks like it checks out to me. Some pretty interesting tidbits, and (if true) an example of a corporation contributing to OSS and making money off of it. If anyone can confirm or deny this information, please do so!