It’s all over the internet that RHEL6 and newer releases will have a life cycle of 10yrs. This is pretty good news for projects that are deploying systems that have a lifetime of 5yrs or more. Namely Digital Preservation projects, not having to worry about migration between point releases of an operating system platform reduces time and costs.
I’m now more likely to target the systems we develop in work towards a RHEL system (or a RHEL like clone).
Another side effect of this long term support is that it will probably make life easier for those who have lots of virtual machines running RHEL. Longer support means less issues with continually migrating between point releases. From a practical point of view of a operational sysadmin, this is great. From a developers point of view, it’s also not bad either, software written now (assuming the requirements haven’t changed) will probably work long into the future.
Note: I am not a RHEL (Fedora) fanboy, I used to sysadmin a few hundred RHEL (scientific linux) based systems. Before that, I used to sysadmin a few hundred Debian based systems.