Fedora Project

The Fedora Project is an independent project to co-ordinate the development of Fedora Linux, a Linux-based operating system, operating with the vision of "a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities." The project's mission statement is to create "an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users". The project also oversees Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, a special interest group which maintains the eponymous packages. The project was founded in 2003 as a result of a merger between the Red Hat Linux (RHL) and Fedora Linux projects. It is sponsored by Red Hat (an IBM subsidiary) primarily, but its employees make up only 35% of project contributors, and most of the over 2,000 contributors are unaffiliated members of the community. The Fedora Project was founded in November 2003 when Red Hat decided to split Red Hat Linux into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and a community-based operating system, Fedora. Red Hat Professional Workstation was created at this same time with the intention of filling the niche that RHL had once filled but it was created without a certain future. This option quickly fell by the wayside for non-enterprise RHL users in favor of Fedora. The first edition of the Fedora operating system—then known as Fedora Core 1—was released on November 6, 2003. Fedora Core 1 was released on a fixed schedule, every four to six months. The Fedora distribution has a reputation as being a FOSS distribution that focuses on innovation and close work with upstream Linux communities. In November 2021, the company announced the release of Fedora Linux 35. Fedora 36 was released the following year in May 2022. In August 2008, several Fedora servers were compromised. Upon investigation it was found that one of the compromised servers was used for signing Fedora update packages.