Ride the Wave with Fedora 9

A little more than two weeks after the release of Fedora 9 and we’re certainly making waves with strong download numbers. At almost exactly the one-week mark, Fedora 9 saw about 15 percent more downloads than Fedora 8 received during its first week. While this is an impressive number, Fedora is continuing to experience growth in other areas too.

Every statistic showing our community’s size and involvement is rising steadily, and we continue to gather these statistics using open, transparent methods. We are seeing enormous success in growing a community of not just open source consumers, but open source contributors. Since the debut of our new Fedora Account System, the number of account holders has increased dramatically, and well over 75 percent of our contributors are non-Red Hat employees. We’re also happy to report that the number of volunteer representatives in our global Ambassadors program has risen to over 350 members. During the coming months, we’ll be placing high emphasis on expanding Fedora’s reach in Europe with former Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack moving to the Netherlands to manage our community efforts. His counterpart in the Asia-Pacific region is Harish Pillay, a Red Hat associate based in Singapore.

Heavy participation in Fedora by people who use and support Linux in demanding business environments promotes a high level of quality and superior innovation. Fedora also works diligently with the upstream software communities whose work is part of Fedora. By doing this, rather than simply patching our packages, Fedora aims to ensure that the advances in the distribution benefit the entire open source community. In addition, new technologies that Fedora is rolling out over the next several months will make it easier than ever for people to join the community, contribute new ideas or code, and publish their work.

Planning and development work have already begun on Fedora 10, which is planned for release in late October or early November 2008.