Fedora Project

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The Fedora Project logo

The Fedora Project is the community responsible for producing the Fedora Linux distribution and Fedora Extras, 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 many 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.

The discontinuation of Red Hat Linux in favor of Fedora Core caused a controversy in the Linux community. Many thought that Red Hat was simply dropping its established user base and moving on to the enterprise market, leaving existing users with no upgrade option. The situation has since become somewhat less confused, although this misconception is still common amongst some.

1 Governance
2 Subprojects
3 Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Governance

The project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Red Hat retains liability for its actions.^[1] The Fedora Project Board is responsible for the direction of the Fedora Project and is comprised of five Red Hat employees and four community members. Additionally, Red Hat appoints a chairman who has veto power over any board decision.^[2] 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 ^[3], but after consideration of a variety of issues, canceled it in favor of the board model currently in place.^[4]^[5]

The project facilitates online communication amongst its developers and community members through public mailing lists and wiki pages. It also coordinates an annual summit in Boston, MA known as the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (commonly called FUDCon). Additional conferences have taken place in Germany, England and India.^[6]

[edit] Subprojects

The Fedora Project consists of a number of smaller subprojects.^[7]^[8] As of February 2007, these subprojects include:

Fedore Core is responsible for maintaining the packages that comprise the Fedora Core distribution.
Fedora Extras maintains the packages that are distributed via the Fedora Extras repository.
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 Live CD Tools is working to create a set of utilities that can be used to create bootable custom live CDs and DVDs.
Fedora Distribution manages distributing Fedora on physical media.

[edit] Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

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.^[9] As of February 2007, the list of Fedora SIGs included:

Fedora Usability aims to increase the intuitiveness and accessibility of the Fedora Desktop.
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 crate a more pleasant user experiance 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 Extras 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.