Tags: Fedora, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Web Services, wikimedia, Wikipedia

Wikipedia switching from Red Hat to Ubuntu powered servers

Wikipedia is one of the most popular online destinations on the web. The user created open source encyclopedia is visited by millions of web users every day.

The administrators of the servers powering Wikipedia are working on switching from Red Hat powered solutions to Ubuntu.

In fact, they have been working on this switch since 2006 and the work is nearing completion.

Brion Vibber, CTO of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation spoke about their decision to move to Ubuntu from Red Hat: “We had a mix of things: some Red Hat 9, some Fedora — several different versions. We decided that we want to standardize on something.”

He added: “It definitely has gotten a lot simpler. We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing. Everything is a million times easier.”

One of the other reasons for this switch was that they did not want to pay Red Hat for support on their provided software solutions.