The new Fedora Project

What replaced Red Hat Linux at that time was the "Red Hat Linux Project," an attempt to transform the process of making Red Hat's core distribution into a more open, community-oriented project. Now, this distribution has gone through another change, as announced on September 22:

The rest of the announcement, thankfully, is in English.

The old Fedora Linux Project was an independent effort to create a set of high-quality add-on packages for Red Hat Linux. Fedora had managed to put together a set of policies, a development community, and an initial set of packages. Red Hat, in its effort to kick-start the Red Hat Linux Project, saw value in all of those things. So now the two projects have merged into a single entity called the Fedora project. The project stuck with the Fedora name, among other reasons, so that the resulting distribution would not run into trademark problems with the Red Hat name. (There may yet be confusion with the Fedora Project hosted at Cornell, which is developing a free digital repository management system.)

Red Hat is still putting together policies and documentation for the new project, so some of the details are still coming into focus. The project leadership role will be in the capable hands of Michael K. Johnson, one of the Red Hat originals. There will be a a steering committee appointed by Red Hat; it currently consists of Karen Bennet, Cristian Gafton, Michael K. Johnson, Jeff Law, and Stephen Tweedie. The plan also calls for an advisory committee, the makeup and duties of which has not yet been determined. Finally, there will be a "technical committee," which is simply the union of the steering and advisory committees.

The Fedora project's output will consist of three distinct sets of packages:

• The Fedora Core will be something that looks like the current Red Hat Linux distribution. It will be the basic distribution that is released by the Fedora project; everything that is in the core distribution will be approved by the steering committee.

• The Fedora Extras is a set of additional packages which complement the core distribution. The Extras are strict add-ons; they cannot conflict with or replace packages in the core distribution. Among other things the Extras will be a sort of staging ground for packages (and their maintainers) to prove themselves before being admitted to the Core distribution. The technical committee will decide which packages get to be in the Extras.

• The Fedora Alternatives is the "contrib" area of the Fedora project; just about any package can be in the Alternatives as long as it is free software and doesn't run into legal problems.

The project planners also foresee a "Fedora Legacy" area for the maintenance of older packages, and a "third party" area that will become the Fedora equivalent of Debian's non-free. Red Hat will have nothing to do with the non-free code, however.

According to the posted schedule, the "test 2" release of the Fedora core is due on September 25. There is a third test release planned for October 13, and the final release should be out on November 3. Then work begins on "Fedora Core 2", which will be, with luck, based on the 2.6 kernel.

To succeed, Fedora must attract a significant amount of community interest and input. Red Hat needs external developers to help with the maintenance of the distribution and bring in new packages. It also very much needs an active user community which will test and deploy the Fedora distribution; to a great extent, Fedora will be part of the quality control process that packages go through before becoming part of the enterprise products.

Bringing in developers will require making them feel like something other than unpaid Red Hat employees. That means giving Fedora a life outside of the company. Red Hat seems to understand that need; for example, Red Hat's Havoc Pennington says:

Of course, this claim is not entirely true: Red Hat does not name, by fiat, the members of any "steering committees" for Mozilla or the kernel. But the idea the company is trying to get across is clear: Fedora, as a project, is separate from Red Hat and its products. The degree to which that is true, and to which Red Hat can step back and let Fedora find its own path will be crucial to Fedora's success. Letting go could be hard for Red Hat to do; almost anybody who has done business with that company will attest that Red Hat, while well-intentioned, very much likes to retain control over the projects it works on. Red Hat also has a history of working well with the free software community, however; they understand well how the free development process works. So when the company says something like:

There is a good chance that things will work out that way.