Among the changes coming to Fedora:
• Red Hat has opened up the source code repository -- governed by software called Concurrent Version System, or CVS -- so outsiders can see the latest software that's in the works. Later, outsiders will be able to approve software submissions into CVS, Dekoenigsberg says.
• The company has also begun a project called Fedora Extras, through which others can maintain software packages that are outside the Fedora Core projects Red Hat is responsible for. Red Hat likely will lighten its own load by transferring some projects in Core to Extras, Dekoenigsberg says.
• Red Hat will hold its first-ever Fedora User and Developer Conference -- FUDcon -- at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 18 and 19 February, right after the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. The conference will be used to hash out issues such as who may commit code to CVS and what qualifications are necessary for packages to be accepted into Extras.
• In addition, the company is offering publicly accessible servers to automate the process of building Fedora Core and Extras software -- and ensuring that components don't conflict with each other.
The promise of Fedora
One developer who has benefited from Red Hat's new policies is Colin Charles, a 20-year-old Malaysian programmer studying in Australia. He's one of a handful of programmers working to create a new version of Fedora for computers using IBM's Power processor family -- most commonly the PowerPC used in Macintosh machines, but also the chips in IBM's pSeries servers.
"CVS helps a lot, especially when you want to try out new packages from the development tree to see if the PPC (PowerPC) issues are fixed or not," Charles said in an email interview. Almost everything in the current Fedora product works on Fedora PPC -- including the OpenOffice suite for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Red Hat programmers Paul Nasrat and David Woodhouse also are involved in Fedora/PPC, Charles added.
And Red Hat could in turn benefit from Charles' work. The company must maintain a version of its Enterprise Linux for Power processors and expects at some point to make a PowerPC version a standard part of the Fedora suite.
"Down the line, that's probably inevitable," Dekoenigsberg says.
The move mirrors what happened with a version of Fedora for x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon and AMD's Opteron. A version of Fedora that supported new 64-bit memory extensions for x86 chips first came from outside programmers, but now it's a standard part of Red Hat's Fedora releases.
