Two years after its first attempt fell short, Red Hat is trying again to reach beyond its own employees for help developing its Linux line.
In 2003, the company launched Fedora, a free Linux package. Red Hat had two objectives. It hoped numerous users would be drawn to the gratis software, making it a good proving ground for components the company was considering for use in its top-selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or "RHEL", package.
It also hoped to inspire those users to begin developing and maintaining their own components within Fedora -- making Red Hat a more vital and central part of the open source realm, boosting the number of enthusiasts familiar with its products, and making Fedora a better beta program for RHEL.
Three versions of Fedora have been released so far, and the company is happy with how users have helped RHEL. But the community effort has fallen short at a time when students and open source enthusiasts have plenty of other channels for their cooperative energies.
"One of the mistakes we made early on when we made the split between RHEL and Fedora was we told everybody that Fedora was public, come help us out," says Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat's community relations manager. "We got lots of people responding," but Red Hat couldn't accept much beyond simple bug reports.
"There just wasn't much they were able to do," he says. "[This time] we want to make sure we have systems and processes to make sure these people can contribute."
In the years since Fedora was launched, the Linux world hasn't stood still. About four months ago open source programmers launched Fedora alternative Ubuntu Linux. Whitebox Linux got started shortly after the first Fedora release. Gentoo, begun in 2001, has gained a higher profile. And Red Hat rival Sun has begun trying to woo developers to its own soon-to-be-open source operating system project, OpenSolaris.
But Red Hat now has begun specific moves to pump up Fedora and stay cutting-edge. If successful, the company could speed development, prime new generations of Red Hat experts and maintain ties with programmers in a way proprietary software rivals such as Microsoft can't.
