Why Fedora? Overview and Q&A Warren Togami Associate Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. Southern California Linux Expo Feb 11-12, 2006

Agenda ● What is Fedora? ● Principles of Fedora ● How to Get Involved ● FC5 features and SCIM framework ● Q&A

History 2002 school project at University of Hawaii Collaborative development of a centralized repository “Extras” only for Red Hat Linux 2003 proposal to merge, create bigger project... (too embarrassing to write here) 2005 something worth talking about

Why? Collaborative development of a centralized repository Sounds familiar Obvious question... Why didn't Warren work on Debian?

Fedora Project Goal Rapid Progress of Free and Open Source Software

Rapid Progress of FOSS (More history of Warren) Advocate and Hawaii LUG K12LTSP for schools Limited success, Free not good enough Believe in the mission But software was not good enough... Users were not happy Must make FOSS better, faster

Primary Principles of Fedora Centralized Collaborative Development Importance of Upstream Release Early, Release Often Mutual Benefit from the partnership between Community and Commercial

Collaborative Development Common sense? Work Together Centralized Reduce Duplication of Effort Everything in one place Consistency so easier to understand Do I really need to explain this? Work Together Centralized Reduce Duplication of Effort Everything in one place Consistency easier to understand

Importance of Upstream Proprietary is NOT an Advantage in OSS Whenever possible, get patches into upstream Everyone benefits from sharing and collaboration We benefit from wider peer review and testing exposure Easier long term maintenance Red Hat Contributions to Upstream Many parts of the kernel GCC, glibc, binutils, elfutils, many parts of GNOME Open Source Java (gcj and Classpath) Many other components

Importance of Upstream Example: Kernel diff -urN |wc -l Sizes between Upstream and Fedora kernel RH FC FC FC FC (when excluding Xen) 2003-Jan Kernel Contributions (changeset estimates) Linus' contributions: 3.900% (1999 out of 50429) IBM's contributions: 7.500% (3797 out of 50429) SuSE's contributions: 4.500% (2275 out of 50429) Conectiva's contributions: 1.200% (640 out of 50429) Red Hat's contributions: % (6045 out of 50429) Other contributions: % (35673 out of 50429)

Release Early, Release Often Essential in Open Source Development Improves Developer/User interaction Wider testing exposure and feedback sooner Stuff happens faster See progress Creates Momentum Excitement about Open Source Software

Mutual Benefit Community is better at... “Fun” things Short-term benefit Attention to detail Many eyes, wider range of hardware Real world situations Company is better at... Long term benefit “Boring” things, Assign someone to do it Examples... GCC 4.1, NPTL, O(1) scheduler, FORTIFY_SOURCE, exec-shield, SELinux

Mutual Benefit

Successful Model (GPL semi-commercial) MySQL AB Trolltech qt Professional and high quality software Excellent developer and user documentation Healthy companies Strength of the GPL Successful Model (Fedora) Somewhat like Ubuntu... The other major North-American Linux company Validates the model of community/commercial partnership

Fedora Project Overview Core Distribution Extras Project Legacy Project Directory Server Upstream Devel Open Source Java Documentatio n

Fedora Project Only 100% Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) ● Free modification ● Free redistribution (15%) Core operating system (90%) Extras repository (90%) Documentation and marketing (??%) Directory Server

Fedora Development Cycle

Fedora Foundation Non-profit corporation Like Apache Software Foundation Red Hat one of many contributors Defend values of Free and Open Source Software ● Rapid progress of FOSS ● Legal defense of FOSS

Fedora Part of Ecosystem

FOSS Ecosystem

How to get Involved? USER Test & Report Bugs ● Discuss first ● ● Check for duplicates ● Report confirmed problems Documentation project Marketing project

How to get Involved? DEVELOPER Core Extras project ● Add your own RPM packages ● 100% Free & Open Source Software ● ~100 contributors today 90% community ● Weekly public IRC “town hall” style meetings Upstream or other projects

FC5 Features kernel Modular X11R7 More hardware support Improved newbie interface (slightly...) Improved Xen support SCIM Lots of other stuff

SCIM Simple Common Input Method framework ● Chinese ● Japanese ● Korean ● Indian ● Etc. Community project = Success

Questions and Answers