The Fedora Project: Open Source Evolved

The Fedora Project is an online community aimed at improving the lives of people around the world through free software. Formed in 2003 as a partnership between Red Hat and volunteer participants from around the world, the Fedora Project supports a growing and thriving open source community with tens of thousands of project members.

Download Fedora 16

Fast Facts:

• New releases of Fedora come out approximately every six months


• Fedora is free to copy, modify and redistribute without any cost or license fees


• All of the code in Fedora and all of the tools used to build Fedora are free and open source software


• Fedora focuses on building strong relationships with upstream software projects


• Red Hat is the primary corporate sponsor for the Fedora Project and a major contributor


• There are more than 24,000 Fedora Account System members who have signed the Contributor License Agreement that allows them to edit and provide new code and content in Fedora


• Around 65% of Fedora's code is maintained by volunteers


• Fedora serves as a community technology incubator, where ideas can be turned into reality quickly


• Innovation through Fedora often forms the basis for many Red Hat open source projects


• There are more than 20,000 installable software packages in Fedora 16

Fedora 16: Get the Future First

Fedora 16's feature list includes:

• An update to the GNOME desktop and Shell with the 3.2 release, which includes new applications, such as Contacts, for contact management, and Documents, for document management both locally and in the cloud.
• Virtualization improvements, including a virtual machine lock manager, and Virt-manager, which displays the operating system and applications within a guest and allows the filesystem of a guest to be browsed (read-only).
• The newest release of SPICE, which aims to be a complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktops. SPICE 0.10 introduces new features, including USB sharing between guest and client and audio volume message passing between guest and client.
• A wide range of cloud features, including:
  • Aeolus, a cross-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, which consists of a web-based user interface and tools for managing cloud instances across heterogenous clouds.
  • OpenStack, another IaaS platform, which takes form as a collection of services for setting up and running a cloud compute and storage infrastructure.
  • Pacemaker-cloud, which provides application service high availability for cloud environments.
  • HekaFS, a cloud-ready version of GlusterFS, which extends the filesystem to be suitable for deployment by a cloud provider by adding in stronger authentication and authorization, encryption, and multi-tenancy.
• Under-the-hood improvements, including moving to GRUB2 for bootloading and further integration of systemd for startup.

For a more complete list of Fedora 16 features, refer to the Fedora community's release announcement.

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