Red Hat and Fedora

From what I understand, Fedora is a community driven project sponsored by Red Hat. What does this mean? What is done by the community, and what is done by Red Hat?

We don't really see it like that. Fedora is a community, and Red Hat is a big participant in that community. Some areas that have traditionally been areas of interest for Red Hat are around the Linux kernel and the GNOME desktop environment, but we have active community participation in those areas by non-Red Hat employees too. Even work that you might assume is being done entirely by Red Hat staff, such as administering and maintaining the servers that run our infrastructure, is a shared community effort with Red Hat employees and volunteer community working together.

Red Hat is one of the companies contributing the most to FOSS and Linux in general. Could you please mention some of the largest projects Red Hat currently contributes to?

We have a large list of places where Red Hat and its employees are contributing on fedoraproject.org.

Some of the largest projects are things like the Linux kernel, Xorg, GNOME, RPM, Java, LVM, Glibc, GCC and Eclipse. But really, there aren't too many things in FOSS that Red Hat isn't involved with these days.

Some people would say that Fedora is the "testing ground" for Red Hats official distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or RHEL). What's your take on the subject?

Fedora is not just a RHEL testing ground, but certainly that is one of our purposes. It's a testing ground for ANYONE to prove new Linux technologies, as long as they get involved in the community as a contributor. We served as a testing ground for KDE 4.0 since we had community members willing to work on integrating it prior to Fedora 9, and the result was that we were able to get bugs and enhancement requests reported to the KDE upstream, thus improving the later KDE 4.x releases.

It's easy to wait for some other distribution to do the hard work, but where's the fun in that?

The default desktop in Fedora 10

For current users of Fedora: Whats on the roadmap for Fedora 11, and what plans do you have beyond this release?

Right now, we're tracking several features for inclusion in Fedora 11:

• 20 Second Startup: Make Fedora boot and shut down faster. The goal is to be at the login screen in 20 seconds and be as fast as possible after the login (gnome-session).
• DeviceKit: A simple system service to manage devices designed to partially replace hal and overcome some of its design limitiations.
• DeltaRPMs: Generate and support delta packages containing only the changes made in a patch update.
• Implement DNSSEC: DNSSEC (DNS SECurity) is mechanism which can prove integrity and authenticity of DNS data. It became more important after new DNS poisoning attacks were found recently. The most widely used name servers should be DNSSEC aware by default (bind, unbound).
• Fingerprint Readers: Make fingerprint readers easy to use as secondary authentication.
• KDE 4.2: Rebase to KDE 4.2 and KOffice 2, and offer new features such as PolicyKit-KDE and a NetworkManager plasma applet.
• Multiseat: Make it simple to configure a system for multiseat operation, where two or more users each have their own keyboard, monitor, and mouse, and can work independently of each other.
• Python 2.6.
• TightVNC: Since RealVNC is effectively dead upstream, we're moving to this maintained fork and merging our patches there.
• Volume Control: Simplify volume control, eliminate complexity of multiple mixers for the normal user.
• Windows Cross Compiler: Build and test full-featured Windows programs, from the comfort of the Fedora system, without needing to use Windows.

There are other features that we're also looking at, but haven't committed to yet, like Ext4 by default, GNOME 2.26, adding a Live image to the install DVD, Support for stronger hashes than SHA-1, and an Instant-On Fedora.

You can see our full list of Features (approved and in process) here.

I remember back in the day, I think it was Fedora Core 5, when Fedora had a development period of 9 months instead of 6 months. You've gone back to the 6 month development-period, why is a 6 month cycle preferred over 9 or even 12 months? I'm asking as Mac and Windows users think 6 month cycles is a really short amount of time...

Well, before Fedora 7, Red Hat was responsible for the "Core" OS, and the community was only able to participate on the fringes. We've since torn down those walls, and as a result, we can move a little bit faster. With a longer release window, we had a lot of users who felt that Fedora was getting stale in those last 3 months, a lot of requests for us to make major changes as an update to a stable release. The 6 month window works very well for us right now, along with supporting multiple stable releases.

Some Linux distributions for more advanced users, like Arch Linux, have a rolling release cycle. Why does user-friendly Linux distributions like Fedora insist in releasing a new version every 6 months, encouraging existing users to re-format, instead of using a rolling release cycle?

I think that there is this myth of the "painless Linux upgrade". I've seen Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo installations fail to do a clean in-place upgrade, due to third party software or hardware specific issues.

In Fedora, we've spent a lot of time ensuring that yum upgrades from one stable release to the next work properly. We've even made a tool called "preupgrade" that resolves all of the dependencies while the system is running, then upgrades the system and reboots you to the new Fedora, without formatting.

We even have a rolling release for advanced users, it's called Rawhide! I wouldn't recommend this, except for the bravest hackers, but it is fun to watch the many pieces grow and change.