The Fedora Project gets flipped into a new group, the Fedora Foundation, and spun off from the main corporation.
Seeking greater support from the open source community, Raleigh-based Red Hat announced at its conference in New Orleans the formation of the Fedora Foundation.
The move was likely a response to those who see Red Hat as becoming too corporate in its workings, and mirrors AOL’s spinoff of the Mozilla project into its own foundation. Red Hat will still provide financial support for the new group.
Quite a few projects in the open source community have earned substantial support from developers. Apache and MySQL stand out with the number of developers each has working on its projects.
Red Hat seems to be hoping for a similar boost. Some developers have been unhappy with the company since it introduced Fedora. Red Hat has controlled the initiative since its departure from the individual consumer market in favor of its Enterprise Linux offering.
One might wonder what Jess Villasante thinks of the decision. Mr. Villasante thinks US businesses use the open source community as an inexpensive source of technology labor.
The conspiracy-minded will note that Michael Dell’s investment company, MSD Management, purchased a $99.5 million USD slice of Red Hat’s $600 million debenture pie. That happened early in May of this year. Previously, Dell Computers have offered Red Hat Linux as an option on some of its workstations and servers.
And the Round Rock-based computer maker would certainly benefit in its leadership role as PC maker from a greater Linux development effort. Enhancements to Fedora mean enhancements to Enterprise Linux. But this is purely speculative thinking.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
