The Fedora Project is an endeavor 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]
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The Fedora project was founded December 2002 by University of Hawaii Computer Science student Warren Togami. When Red Hat decided to split Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and a community-based version, the name Fedora was eventually selected[2], 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.[3] 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.
In August 2008 several Fedora servers were compromised. Upon investigation it was found that one of the compromised servers was used for signing Fedora update packages. The Fedora Project stated that the attacker(s) did not get the package signing key which could be used to introduce malicious software onto Fedora users' systems through the update process. Project administrators performed checks on the software and did not find anything to suggest that a Trojan horse had been introduced into the software. As a precaution the Project converted to new package signing keys.[4][5]
Fedora published the full details on 30 March 2009.[6]
The Fedora Project is not a separate legal entity or organization; Red Hat retains liability for its actions.[7] The Fedora Project Board is responsible for the direction of the Fedora Project and comprises four Red Hat appointed members and five community-elected members. Additionally, Red Hat appoints a chairman who has veto power over any board decision.[8] 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,[9] but after consideration of a variety of issues, canceled it in favor of the board model currently in place.[10][11]
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.[12]
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