Fedora Project Turns 10

darthcamaro writes "It was ten years ago this past Sunday September 22nd, that the Red Hat sponsored Fedora project was born. The first Fedora release didn't come until six weeks later in November of 2003. Over the last 10 years the project has transformed itself from being entirely controlled by Red Hat to being a true community effort. In a video interview, the current Fedora Project Leader, Robyn Bergeron talks about the past and the future of Fedora. 'We need to think about how we're actually making the sausage,' Bergeron said. 'I think we can try and abstract and automate the things we have to do a lot, so our really awesome people's brains can be applied to solving problems that aren't yet automate-able.'"

Comments

Not controlled by Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary implies Fedora is not under the control of Red Hat. However, since almost all the key people at the Fedora project are employees of Red Hat, I find it hard to believe Red Hat isn't running the show.

Re:Not controlled by Red Hat?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't be wrong (mostly).

While it's true that a lot of the development work targeted to a specific Fedora release (just look at their Feature Lists in the planning part of the wiki) is led by Red Hat employees it's also true that anyone can propose and work on any feature they want.

It's no coincidence that a lot of the features listed in each release in the past 2-4 years can be tied back to general enterprise features, after all Virtualization is one of Red Hat's main public focuses at the moment. The last 3 Fedora Project Leaders were selected from the community and then hired by Red Hat to perform that role, it's not Red Hat planting their own people in. The seemly control over the project only comes from the sheer number of Red Hat employees working on the 'upstream' of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Of course, when you look at the most vocal contributors within the project, you could also argue that Red Hat do control the project, most of the controversial features and decisions (that also often impact other distributions) do come from Red Hat employees, and due to the vocalness/ideologies of the few, the many are ignored.

Re:Not controlled by Red Hat?

[ApplePy]

so people like me, who administer hundreds of servers, dumped red hat. I've actively been phasing out redhat on hundreds of servers in favor of two other distributions at my employer who has over a million users. At my last employer, I lead the same effort, with clients who have billion dollar plus IT budgets.

Seems to me those are the types of companies with the types of budgets that can both pay for RedHat's subscriptions, and benefit from them.

And it should be mutual... as I understand it, Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux is geared toward just that target market. As handsomely paid as I'm sure you are, I'm not sure why I'm picking up a tone of sour grapes in your post. Also, if you want RHEL for free, there is CentOS... which is still based on work done by the evil Red Hat Corporation.

And really, it's not that much different than the business model of other Linux companies. SuSE doesn't give you their enterprise stuff for free, nor does Ubuntu. None of it bothers me. As far as I'm concerned, Linux has always been free for nerds... and someday, when my company has a billion-dollar budget to upgrade our cloud, we'll no doubt be writing checks, happily, to RedHat.

Re:Not controlled by Red Hat?

[Gavagai80]

Sheesh, there's nothing wrong with Red Hat tying their brand name to only what they're providing support for. You're perfectly free to install CentOS if you want RHEL without support, and Red Hat is perfectly free to not want their name on it or for their reputation to take the hit when you can't make something work without the support.

User since '97

[MSG]

My first Linux distro was Slackware, and it was damn educational. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. A little less than a year later, I tried Red Hat Linux (4.2) and never turned back.

I tried Debian a few times early on, and the system would always break when I applied updates. Break, as in, it would either no longer boot or I could no longer log in.

Debian was what I wanted in a distribution: committed to Free Software. Red Hat angered a lot of users when it split off Fedora, but I never understood that. Fedora was the distribution that I wanted Red Hat to be. Free Software and community driven. Since apt and yum came into the picture, Red Hat's distribution has been the best of the bunch. The company maintains their commitment to Free Software, releasing the code to acquisition after acquisition, and leads all others in developing GNU/Linux.

Thank you Red Hat. There are too many negative comments here. I love Fedora.