Introduction to Fedora David Nalley September 10, 2008 version 0.2

What is Open Source Software ● Software that is generally free of cost, but not always ● More importantly software that is free in the following ways: – The freedom to run the program, for any purpose – The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs – The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor – The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits 2

Who contributes ● Corporations – Red Hat – IBM – Intel ● Individuals – Teenagers in high school – People with no “IT background” ● Governments – NSA – DHS 3

Some Examples of Open Source Software ● Apache httpd ● OpenOffice.org ● Linux ● Firefox

What is Fedora? A Linux Distribution ● Free, Innovative, Robust, Free ● Has its origins with Red Hat Linux ● Differs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux – Frequent releases (every 6 months) – Leading edge ● Fedora is the upstream for other distributions – RHEL – OLPC 5

What is Fedora – other projects ● Directory Server ● Fedora 9 has over 6,500 source packages. ● Documentation (release notes, howtos, wiki). ● Translation (80+ languages). ● Worldwide ambassadors and marketing. ● Worldwide volunteer prod-ops and infrastructure team. ● Artwork and websites. ● Quality assurance and bug triage. 6

Philosophy – Fedora's Four Foundations 7

Freedom 8 Free/Libre Open Source Software Free from patent encumbrances Free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute, now and forever

Friends 9 Friends – working towards a common goal “gregdek? sure we know each other from irc”

Features 10 Taking ownership of features – making them usable Well managed feature implementation Fedora – the feature-full distribution

First 11 Fedora is often the first mainstream distribution to tackle new features – SELinux – PulseAudio – KDE4 Fedora leads in putting freedom first – Zimbra – Perl artistic licenses – Actively seeking FSF review

Got Fedora? get.fedoraproject.org