The Fedora Project is an online community aimed at improving the lives of people around the world through free software. Formed in 2003 as a partnership between Red Hat and volunteer participants from around the world, the Fedora Project supports a growing and thriving open source community with tens of thousands of project members.
Fast Facts:
- New releases of Fedora come out approximately every six months
- Fedora is free to copy, modify and redistribute without any cost or license fees
- All of the code in Fedora and all of the tools used to build Fedora are free and open source software
- Fedora focuses on building strong relationships with upstream software projects
- Red Hat is the primary corporate sponsor for the Fedora Project and a major contributor
- There are more than 20,000 Fedora Account System members who have signed the Contributor License Agreement that allows them to edit and provide new code and content in Fedora
- Around 65% of Fedora's code is maintained by volunteers
- Fedora serves as a community technology incubator, where ideas can be turned into reality quickly
- Innovation through Fedora often forms the basis for many Red Hat open source projects
- There are more than 17,600 installable software packages in Fedora 15
Fedora 15's feature list includes:
- A fresh look and feel with the new GNOME 3 desktop and GNOME Shell.
- BoxGrinder is a set of tools for making appliances, typically used in virtualized environments, or for use in a cloud environment. It grinds out a preconfigured disk image, including the operating system and required software ready for deployment and can deliver the appliance to a targeted location.
- SystemD replaces SysVinit and Upstart as the default system and session manager in Fedora 15. It provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic.
- A dynamic firewall that is able to handle firewall changes without the need to restart the entire firewall.
- Consistent network device naming scheme from ethX to a physical location-based name for easy identification and use.
- The LibreOffice® productivity suite with word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet, database creator, formula editor, and drawing editor – all completely open source and driven solely by its supporting community.
There are over 20,000 Fedora contributors that have signed the Contributor License which is an agreement that allows them to contribute to the Fedora Project.
There are multiple benefits, and individual contributors sometimes realize very different individual benefits through their involvement. One major benefit contributors often cite is in the act of collaborating itself. Fedora community members enjoy working on new features, solving problems and interacting with other folks that share a common interest. Because Fedora is an open and transparent project, it also provides a way for people to demonstrate their skills at work to potential partners, customers, or employers.
The development cycle is purposely restricted to six months to encourage rapid innovation and collaboration between thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide. Six months gives us the best balance between providing the latest software with the quality that users expect from a release.