Red Hat Starts Up Fedora Foundation

Red Hat is attempting to gain more support in the open source community by spinning off its Fedora open source project into a separate group called the Fedora Foundation. As part of the deal, the development and ownership will fall under the new group, while Red Hat will still support it financially.

Fedora is the code base on which Red Hat Linux is based. The company wants to increase its visibility in the open source community, and felt spinning off Fedora was a proper first step. The move mirrors a similar approach taken by AOL with the formation of the Mozilla Foundation.

While Fedora is popular within the Red Hat open source community itself, it does not share the same broad-based support outside the community, as does Apache, MySQL and Mozilla. Red Hat hopes the move will spur increased progress on Fedora and build a larger community of developers.

The first Linux distribution under the Fedora project was released in late 2003. Red Hat plans to release version 4 of Fedora this month, the company said at the annual Red Hat Summit.

Also announced by the company at its annual conference was the Software Patent Commons, which is much like the Creative Commons License used for music and art. The company hopes that the new license structure will allow developers to work together with less concern over patent infringement.

The Software Patent Commons is part of Red Hat's effort to push for patent reform both in the United States and in Europe. The company joined forces with Nokia claiming that the current structure is a threat to the future of open source.