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.

On this page:  Fast facts  |  Fedora 18 features   |  FAQs  |  Learn more

Fast facts

  • New releases of Fedora come out approximately every 6 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 lets them 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.
  • The total of unique IPs across Fedora releases since tracking was initiated at Fedora 7 and is now approaching 45 million connections.

Fedora 18: Get the future first

Fedora 18's feature list includes:

  • A re-written user interface for Fedora's installation procedure is part of Anaconda and provides significant improvement sto the installation experience.
  • The new GNOME 3.6 desktop environment provides new enhancements to the message tray, notificaitons, Activities Overview and accessibility support. New desktops such as MATE and Cinnamon are available as well in Fedora 18, and the popular KDE and Xfce desktops have been updated as well.
  • Updates to languages and programming environments, including Python, Rails< D and Perl.
  • System administrators will want to check out the newly released Samba 4, a unified command-line interface for managing multiple storage technologies.
  • Fedora 18 also includes the 3.1 release of oVirt, and the recent Folsom release of OpenStack.

For a more complete list of Fedora 18 features, refer to the Fedora community's release announcement.

Fedora FAQs

How can Fedora give away all of the code that people have contributed?

There are more than 24,000 Fedora contributors who have signed the Contributor License Agreement, which allows them to contribute to the Fedora Project. Further, all code and content produced in the Project is provided under a free and open source software license that preserves users' rights to copy, distribute, and make derivative works.

What benefit does a contributor gain from participating in the Fedora community?

There are multiple benefits, and individual contributors realize very different individual benefits through their involvement. One major benefit contributors often cite is in the act of collaborating itself. Fedora community members enjoy working on new features, solving problems, and interacting with other folks who share a common interest. Because Fedora is an open and transparent project, it also provides a way for people to demonstrate their skills at work to potential partners, customers, or employers.

Why such a short development cycle?

The development cycle is purposely restricted to 6 months to encourage rapid innovation and collaboration among thousands of Fedora project contributors worldwide. Six months gives us the best balance between providing the latest software with the quality that users expect from a release.

Where can I learn more?

For more information on Fedora 18, to download the distribution, or to join this community effort, please visit the Fedora Project website.

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