Sure some admins may not wish to tinker with running servers too much, but part of the fun of the job is surely, to have some backup system and a quick flip over at some point.

I much prefer a rolling release style approach to operating systems, so many components update so often, that trying to maintain stability on older systems without updating to the latest and greatest is actually quite hard to achieve.

Still RedHat probably have a enough people to support a staggered many version release cycle.

"Version 4.8 is scheduled for the first half of 2009.

RHEL 5 was released in 2007"

What sort of crazy versioning system is this?

There are four extant flavours of RHEL. 2.1 is having its last gasp and all support will formally end next May; RHEL3 is in maintenance mode (I think); RHEL4 and RHEL5 are under active development.

It's not a crazy versioning scheme, it's four distinct products. And yes, there are people that want to stick with the older products ('versions') mostly because they do what they were bought for and on the hardware bought at the time and there is simply no point in going through a major upgrade. New hardware, on the other hand, will get the newer product (often because the new hardware won't run with the old OS).

Love seeing this. I'm looking forward to the 4.7 release, too. Additionally, there will certainly be improvements externally with the Center for Internet Security (CISecurity.org) benchmarks for these OS's.