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Fedora Project

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The Fedora Project logo

The Fedora Project is a project sponsored by Red Hat to co-ordinate the development of the Fedora operating system. Founded on September 2003 as a result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux (RHL) and old Fedora Linux projects. The project consists, not only of Red Hat employees, but community members worldwide which make up 75% of all contributors within the Fedora Project.[1]

History

When Red Hat split Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora, it left the 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.[2] This option quickly fell to the wayside for non-enterprise RHL users in favor of Fedora. The Fedora community continues to thrive and the Fedora distribution has a reputation as being a FOSS 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.[3] 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.[4] 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,[5] but after consideration of a variety of issues, canceled it in favor of the board model currently in place.[6][7]

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.[8]

Subprojects & Special interest groups

The Fedora Project consists of a number of smaller subprojects.[9][10] As of December 2008, these subprojects include[11]:

  • 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 in Fedora distributions.
  • Fedora Infrastructure maintains those computer services upon with the Fedora Project depends including mailing lists, the website and wiki, Concurrent_Versions_System (CVS) repositories and the Extras build system.
  • Fedora Websites aims to develop and maintain the Fedora Project formal websites and to coordinate with community websites.
  • Fedora Internationalization focuses on making Fedora work well for many international languages.
  • Fedora News is where news for the Fedora Project are collected, discussed, and disseminated.

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 November 2009, the list of Fedora SIGs included:

  • Amateur Radio aims to improve the Fedora collection by adding packages for amateur radio (Ham Radio) operators and shortwave radio listeners (SWLs).
  • Astronomy to gather people interested to improve support for astronomers and astrophysicists.
  • Bug Triage helps to manage the flow of bug reports filed against other Fedora projects. They stand to prevent the other project members being overwhelmed by bug reports, eliminating trivial bugs, removing or correcting flawed or inadequate reports, and making sure that maintainers are able to get things done.
  • Desktop strives to make Fedora a very good desktop distribution. The goal is to produce a more targeted desktop spin while maintaining traditional Fedora strengths such as security and commitment to free software. The Desktop SIG will develop and release the "Fedora Desktop" live CD.
  • EPEL is targeted at filling the gap between the complete Fedora Collection and the packages that are maintained in Enterprise Linux. We are a community of individuals focusing on package maintenance and infrastructure to provide as many packages as possible to the consumers of Enterprise Linux.
  • Fonts is an informal group of Fedora Linux contributors. It is dedicated to improving fonts availability and text rendering/layouting in the distribution and its other Linux derivatives.
  • Games to make Fedora the best Free software and open source gaming platform there is for both developers and users.
  • Geographic Information System is an initiative aimed to pack Geographic_information_system (GIS) technology related OSS in Fedora/EPEL and turn Fedora/EPEL to be the best choice for a GIS platform.
  • Independent Software Vendor (ISV) The independent software vendor (ISV) can be anything from a one- or two-man shop to a software design and development powerhouse. Fedora is a great platform for showing off your product, especially to community developers who might be interested in contributing code, plugins, or feedback.
  • KDE a group of Fedora contributors that maintain KDE, a desktop environment, packages in Fedora. Their mission is to provide high-quality, usable KDE software packages to Fedora users and developers and to support one another in maintaining those packages.
  • Live DVD to provide a stable Live DVD per stable release of Fedora.
  • Live Upgrade to participate in efforts to make live upgrades be smoother.
  • LXDE is a group of Fedora contributors that contribute towards LXDE, a desktop environment, in Fedora. Their mission is to define a high-quality LXDE experience to Fedora users and developers in maintaining packages and helping each other in all LXDE related efforts.
  • Fedora Mini a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in Fedora on small devices. Initially aimed at supporting NetBooks, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), it could over time be expanded to also cover things such as Set Top Boxes (STBs).
  • Fedora Medical is a group of Fedora contributors that are interested in having a dedicated spin/application bundle to be used by the healthcare and medical community.
  • Mono a group of Fedora contributors that maintain Mono (and related) packages in Fedora. Their goal is to provide high-quality and usable mono software packages to Fedora users and developers and to support one another in maintaining those packages.
  • Printing to create a good printing experience on Fedora.
  • Robotics to bring packages of open and free software related to robotics and educational software for robotics into Fedora and make Fedora fit to power (mobile) robots.
  • Ruby for people who are interested in improving the state of Ruby in Fedora. This includes packaging Ruby libraries and applications, setting and improving standards for packaging them as RPM's and maintaining Ruby packages for Fedora.
  • Science and Technology to improve the number and quality of packages available for scientific and technical users.
  • Secondary Arches to promote fedora on different architectures.
  • Server to make Fedora suitable for server deployments and the perfect base for enterprise systems like RHEL.
  • Spins for technical review of Spins contributed by the community.
  • Stateless Linux an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.
  • Store to getting a store running, both for users looking for one-off purchases and for Ambassadors who need swag in bulk.
  • Usability aims to provide coherence, accessibility and intuitiveness for all people using Fedora and its associated resources.
  • Xfce works on the integration of the Xfce desktop environment. The aim is to establish Xfce as desktop environment besides GNOME and KDE.

References

  1. ^ "Ride the Wave with Fedora 9". 2008-05-28. Retrieved 2009-11-24.
  2. ^ "linux.com :: Red Hat Professional Workstation:More Expensive,Fewer features". 2004-02-14. Retrieved 2007-12-21.
  3. ^ "Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack Responds to Slashdot Questions". 2006-08-18. Retrieved 2007-02-12.
  4. ^ "The Fedora Project Board". Retrieved 2007-02-11.
  5. ^ Peter Galli (2005-06-03). "Red Hat Creates Fedora Foundation". Retrieved 2007-02-06.
  6. ^ "The Fedora Foundation". Retrieved 2007-02-06.
  7. ^ Max Spevack (2006-04-04). "Fedora Foundation". Retrieved 2007-02-06.
  8. ^ "FUDCon". Retrieved 2007-02-12.
  9. ^ "Fedora Project Projects". Retrieved 2009-11-24.
  10. ^ a b "Defining Projects". Retrieved 2007-02-18.
  11. ^ "Fedora Project SIGs". Retrieved 2009-11-24.

See also

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