Through this series of blog posts we’ve attempted to highlight just a few of the many significant features that will be included in Fedora 10. We hope these posts have piqued your interest and encouraged you to download Fedora 10 and even get involved in the Fedora Community. The final release can be downloaded tomorrow starting at 10am ET.

#9. A Powerful Key: Fedora Community Infrastructure
We admit it, we’re a little biased about our Fedora Infrastructure team. After all, they run all the services that allow Fedora to keep turning out our innovative free software distribution. These services include the extensive network of hosts for maintaining, building, testing, and publishing software packages and updates. Also included is the MirrorManager system that carries Fedora to hundreds of distribution points around the world, to make new releases a celebration for everyone, including the Infrastructure team itself.

Our infrastructure also includes Fedora Hosted, a completely free and open source software project repository. Fedora Hosted has a lineup of over 200 free software projects including Spacewalk, the Linux systems management solution; cobbler and koan, part of our provisioning tool set; K12Linux, the Linux Terminal Server Project for Fedora; and every piece of our infrastructure code, including Fedora Hosted itself! Any Fedora project member can request a software project repository of their own, with a choice of CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, or Git back ends.

The Infrastructure team also runs Fedora Talk, a voice over IP system for Fedora members to communicate with each other using Asterisk, the free software PBX implementation. There’s also a complete set of public testing servers built on the exact same free software virtualization tools with which Fedora and Red Hat lead the pack.

One powerful key unlocks this entire ecosystem of services – free and open source software. Fedora is built entirely from 100% free and open source, to ensure that all community members can not only help contribute to any part of our project, but even duplicate our systems in their own environments. This philosophy also forms the basis for the community services infrastructure guidelines we’re producing to guide any open source initiative all the way from provisioning to maintenance. Excellence through openness and transparency – another way Fedora helps to fuel the engines of free software.

#10. The Remix Rules Them All
We’ve been pioneering remixes in Fedora for a couple of years now. Since Fedora 7, you’ve been able find what we call Spins, or special formulations of Fedora for different interests, on our dedicated site. For Fedora 10, we’re featuring a wide selection of spins for KDE lovers, electronics engineers and designers, and educators. These Spins have gone through extra care to receive the official Fedora stamp through our release engineering process.

But what about all the other remixes out there that are yet to be dreamed up? Well, hold the presses, because we’ve made it easier than ever for people to make their ideas part of the Fedora ecosystem. Our new Fedora Remix mark allows combinations of our software – with or without additives – to show where they came from. With over 10,000 free software packages already in Fedora, and more every day, chances are that remixers can find what they need already part of Fedora. It’s just a matter of using our remix software like livecd-tools to build a ready-to-run derivative for any community.

But what about adding outside software, or layered products? This is often the case for developers with a great idea for a new appliance. Now they can use our appliance tools to build their masterpiece, and then brand it with the Fedora Remix mark without any special process required. Identifying a product as a Fedora Remix gives the new appliance the added brand power of the leading community Linux distribution, but it also allows the builder to provide a clear path for their audience to participate in advancing the infrastructure on which they base their products. Everybody wins with the open source development model. Fire up Fedora 10 and you can give it a try yourself.