The Fedora Project: Open source evolved

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat®-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project. Formed in 2003 as a partnership between Red Hat and volunteers from around the world, the Fedora Project supports a growing and thriving open source community with thousands of project members.

Fast facts

  • New releases of Fedora come out every 6 months.

  • Fedora is free to copy, modify, and redistribute without any cost and license fees.

  • Red Hat is the primary sponsor for the Fedora Project and a major contributor.

  • There are over 20,000 Fedora Account System members who have signed the Contributor License Agreement, which lets them edit and provide new code and content in Fedora.

  • Around 65% of Fedora's code is maintained by volunteers.

  • Fedora serves as a community research and development lab where ideas can be turned into reality quickly.

  • Innovation through Fedora often forms the basis of many Red Hat open source projects.

  • There are over 17,600 installable software packages in Fedora 14.

Fedora 14: Get the future first

Fedora 14's feature list includes:

  • All new debugging features for developers, such as support for dynamic/unplanned memory usage tracking and faster launch thanks to pregenerated indexes.

  • Powerful remote and out-of-band management capabilities with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) support.

  • Framework software for SPICE, a rapidly advancing infrastructure for full desktop virtualization.

  • Updated images available for Amazon EC2 to test-drive the latest open source technologies in the cloud.

Fedora 14 also features numerous desktop improvements that all users can see and experience, including:

  • Faster processing time for picture files using the new and more-efficient libjpeg-turbo library.

  • An updated technical preview of the GNOME shell environment, part of the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release.

  • A subset of new and innovative software from the MeeGo community for an enhanced experience on netbooks and small devices.

Some of the many additional features in Fedora 14 include:

  • OpenSCAP, an open source framework for the Security Content Automation Protocol, which provides a framework and approach to maintaining system security backed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards.

  • Support for emergent programming languages like D, and refreshed versions of popular languages such as Python 2.7, Erlang R14, and the Rakudo Star implementation of Perl 6.

For a more complete list of Fedora 14 features, see the Fedora community's release announcement.

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