Red Hat Frees Fedora to the Fedora Foundation

Red Hat announced that it is releasing the copyrights and development work of the free Fedora version of Linux over to the Fedora Foundation.
Red Hat, one of the most popular Linux distributions, forked into two projects back in 2002. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was targeted at commercial customers, while Fedora was the free, community distribution. Red Hat, Inc. has failed at trying to attract the outside involvement that it hoped to get with the Fedora project.

"The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Development will be done in a public forum ... By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community," the Fedora Project Web site says.

Many developers have critisized the direction Fedora has taken with Red Hat, Inc. at the wheel. Fedora has become a testing ground for new technologies that eventually find their way to RHEL.

Some members of the community think that transfering control of the project to the new Fedora Foundation will keep the project community-driven.

"Hopefully this will allow more leadership and steering to come from the community members, who have invested tremendous time and have contributed immensely to the project thus far," an unidentified Fedora community member told internetnews.com.

"It will also make it easier for outsiders to use Fedora as a platform for some other projects and of course as in every controversial decision there are skeptics."

Deputy general counsel at Red Hat Mark Webbink discussed the move with eWEEK in an exclusive interview, "We feel that we are now at a point where we need to give up absolute control. We built our company on the competence of the open-source community and it's time for us to continue to manifest that."


Webbink also added in a statment that Red Hat, Inc. would still provide Fedora with "substantial financial and engineering support."