From its initial creation out of what was once the Red Hat Linux distribution, Fedora has always been a fast moving distribution. As part of that fast moving approach, older releases don’t live all that long. The current policy is that releases will live only until one month after the N-2 (next two) release is out. Fedora 11 came out one month ago and now its time for Fedora 9 to go away.
Officially speaking, this is the end of life for Fedora 9, which was released in May of 2008. Fedora 9 was an important release for Fedora and Red Hat as it helped to re-affirm Red Hat’s commitment to the Linux desktop, following some communication earlier that year that seemed to imply that Red Hat was getting out of the desktop business.
It will be interesting to see as the weeks go by, how many Fedora 9 users drop off and become Fedora 11 users. According to the most recent Fedora stats (June 1, 09), there are over 3 million installations of Fedora 9.