Red Hat Kills Fedora Foundation

Published: April 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat said last week--as LinuxWorld was revving up and FUDCon (that's the Fedora User and Developer Conference) was winding down in Beantown--that it was killing off the Fedora Foundation that was created last summer.

According to a detailed account of the decision-making process posted on the Fedora Project site by Max Spevack, the leader of Red Hat's Fedora development community for its commercialized implementation of the Linux, the Fedora Foundation never seemed to find its purpose. Spevack said that Mark Webbink, Red Hat's intellectual property guru, launched the Fedora Foundation to be a repository for patents to help protect the open source community, but that the foundation's mission quickly ballooned to the point where is couldn't do anything. "Once we announced the intention to form a Foundation, people inside and outside of Red Hat were interested in working beyond the stated purpose--an intellectual property repository--and instead saw this new Foundation as a potential tool to solve all sorts of Fedora-related issues," he explained. "Every Fedora issue became a nail for the Foundation hammer, and the scope of the Foundation quickly became too large for efficient progress."

Governance of the Fedora Project will come internally, through its board of directors. And that also means that Red Hat, which pays people to do Fedora work, will continue to exercise control over what goes into the Fedora implementations of Linux. The Fedora board will have nine people on it, with Spevack as its chairman.

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