Fedora Project
The Opening of an Already Open Source Project
Session S74
LinuxWorld
San Francisco
2004
Moscone Convention Center

The Panel

Havoc Pennington – Desktop Architect, Red Hat Inc.

Jesse Keating – Linux Systems Engineer, Pogo Linux and Project Leader, Fedora Legacy Project

Justin Forbes – Lead Developer, Fedora X86-64

Jack Aboutboul – Community Developer, Fedora Project

The presentation can be downloaded from http://www.linuxtx.org/lwces74.sxi

Introduction to Fedora

What is the Fedora Project?

History/Background

Red Hat Linux

RHL Project vs Fedora Linux Project

The “struggle” of co-existence (Fedora Extras)

What is the Fedora Project?

The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.

History/Background

Red Hat's Flagship Product

Well Know

Highly respected

Highly accepted

Red Hat's struggle to maintain a commercially viable product, while pleasing the community

Decision made to open RHL into RHL Project and focus on enterprise offerings

The need to keep the community happy and thriving

RHL Project vs Fedora Linux Project

RHL Project was focused on getting community involved

Fedora Linux Project started at U of Hawaii by Warren Togami

Fedora Linux Project was focused on creating third party packages of stuff not shipped with RHL

Never really conflicted!

Merger of the two Projects

Red Hat decides to adopt fedora.us and its packaging standards

Goals were very similar

Red Hat uses fedora.us namesake

Fedora.us to provide packages for newly created Fedora Project and its releases (Fedora Core)

The Struggle of co-existence

Would Fedora packages be in main tree?

Community members involved need access to cvs and bugzilla

The creation of Fedora “Extras”

Project structure starts to take shape

New Fedora Development Model

More Open to Outsiders

Fostering a sense of community

Benefits of Being community-centric

Red Hat Pledges Support

Community's Response

YUM and Alternatives

More Open to Outsiders

New Release every 6 months

Rapid Development/test/release cycle

Community members now have a say

Fedora welcomes contributors

Fedora welcomes anyone interested

Benefits of Being Community Centric

No support commitments facilitates rapid adoption of new technologies

Community grows as more people are interested

More people involved can do things that engineers don't necessarily have time to do

Easier access to developers to get things modified

Community's Response

Tons of traffic on mailing lists

A multitude of new sites pop up, dedicated to the project and getting involved

FedoraNews and FNU

FedoraForums

FedoraFAQ

FedoraPeople

YUM and Alternatives

Seth Vidal and YUM

Package management and dependencies

The best solution, currently to many problems

Third part repositories

Anyone can set up a repository and have rpms up

rpm.livna.org

freshrpms

DAG

Fedora Project Milestones

One of the best free and open desktop distros

Community steps up

Fedora Legacy

Fedora x86_64

Fedora PPC

2004-08-05T01:28:17