The Fedora Project logo

The Fedora Project is the community responsible for producing the Fedora Linux distribution, along with a variety of other projects. It is the result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux (RHL) and old Fedora Linux projects in September 2003, and is officially sponsored by Red Hat, which has employees working on the project's code. The Fedora Linux project developed Extras packages for older Red Hat Linux distributions (RHL 8, RHL 9, FC 1, FC 2) before it became part of the Fedora Project.

When Red Hat Linux split between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the Fedora project it left existing small business and home users with some uncertainty about what to do. Red Hat Professional Workstation was created at this same time with the intention of filling the niche that RHL had once filled but it was created without a certain future.^[1] This option quickly fell to the wayside for non-enterprise RHL users in favor of the Fedora Project. Recently the Fedora community has been thriving, and the Fedora distribution has a reputation as being a fully-open distribution that focuses on innovation and close work with upstream Linux communities.

Governance

The project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Red Hat retains liability for its actions.^[2] The Fedora Project Board is responsible for the direction of the Fedora Project and comprises five Red Hat appointed members and four community-elected members. Additionally, Red Hat appoints a chairman who has veto power over any board decision.^[3] Within Red Hat, this chairman holds the position of "Fedora Project Leader". Red Hat at one point created a separate Fedora Foundation to govern the project,^[4] but after consideration of a variety of issues, canceled it in favor of the board model currently in place.^[5][6]

The project facilitates online communication amongst its developers and community members through public mailing lists and wiki pages. It also coordinates an annual summit known as the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (commonly called FUDCon). Additional conferences have taken place in Germany, England and India.^[7]

Subprojects

The Fedora Project consists of a number of smaller subprojects.^[8][9] As of February 2007, these subprojects include:

• Fedora Engineering Steering Committee provides the day to day technical operations of the Fedora Project.
• Fedora Documentation provides manuals, tutorials and reference materials to accompany Fedora Project releases.
• Fedora Translation works to translate software, documentation and websites associated with the Fedora Project.
• Fedora Marketing strives to increase the size of the Fedora Project user and developer communities.
• Fedora Ambassadors represent the Fedora Project at various events.
• Fedora Artwork is responsible for creating a pleasing and consistent visual experience.
• Fedora Infrastructure maintains those computer services upon with the Fedora Project depends including mailing lists, the website and wiki, CVS repositories and the Extras build system.
• Fedora Distribution manages distributing Fedora on physical media.

Special interest groups

In addition to the well-established projects, a number of special interest groups (SIGs) exist with the Fedora Project. The groups have not yet met the criteria necessary for "project" status.^[10] As of February 2007, the list of Fedora SIGs included:

• Fedora Usability aims to increase the intuitiveness and accessibility of the Fedora Package.
• Fedora Education targets the education sector including teachers and students.
• Fedora Printing wishes to improve the printing experience on Fedora.
• Fedora Rendering is exploring ways to create a more pleasant user experience using technologies such as OpenGL and Cairo.
• Fedora Bug Triage aims to manage workflow around bug reports.
• Stateless Linux is an "OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state".
• Fedora Engineering has a number of SIGs aimed at packaging various type of applications including games, VoIP, Scientific and Technical tools, Music and Media Production software and applications written in languages such as mono, Perl, PHP, and Python.
• Fedora Astronomy aims to increase support for astronomers and astrophysicists in Fedora.

References

External links

• Fedora Project homepage

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