Defining the Fedora Project

Let me put it more simply: From a RHEL development perspective, individual Fedora releases might be viewed as development milestones leading to a RHEL release but for the large majority of Fedora contributors, Fedora stands on its own and is used for other purposes like say running the #1 supercomputer in the world or powering all those OLPC systems.Fedora includes around 12000 software packages but typically includes only about 2500 or so. It is easy to miss the rather vibrant and diverse community with a wide variety of goals if you focus only on the RHEL relationship. A lot of activity in Fedora has absolutely nothing to do with RHEL whatsoever.

Since the large majority of software packages in Fedora is maintained by volunteers who have a independent interest in Fedora outside of RHEL, they are now discussing what the future of the project should be along with Red Hat employees working exclusively on Fedora or other leading edge projects. Fedora's technical development is led by FESCo which is a completely elected body of representatives. Things like release schedule, update policies etc can be revised independently by this group along with other leaders in the Fedora community.