Fedora 7 is hitting the streets, and I was fortunate to catch up last week with Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, to discuss new features in this release, and Fedora's contribution to the Linux community and to Red Hat. Fedora tends to get lost in the discussion about Red Hat, but Max made it clear that Fedora is very much an integral, vibrant part of Red Hat's value. On the cool new features...Some people wan On the cool new features…Some people want a live CD, some want an installable ISO, some want full remixability. These are the three big new things in Fedora 7. On the last item, we have a massive library of packages with open, robust tools that allow a user to build a custom spin of Fedora to build an ISO in the user’s image. So, it’s about freedom of development in a very wide sense. Some of these things (live CD, for example) are not new to the industry. Ubuntu and Knoppix and others have had this for some time. But the Revisor tool is very new and innovative. It’s a graphical appliation built on top of Fedora’s other build tools that gives incredible flexibility to build an ISO, a live CD, etc. Building becomes an open exercise. [Or, as the press release notes:Fedora 7 provides the first appliance development platform that is 100 percent open source with an entirely free distribution build toolchain. The Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and the distributions are built with an external, open source compose tool that allows access by the entire Fedora community.Not bad….]Fedora’s business value for the company:Fedora represents Red Hat’s open research platform. From the perspective of the techie, Fedora is the upstream source for everything Red Hat ships (in Linux). There have been a number of things over the year’s that first saw the light of RHEL day in Fedora, like virtualization, SE Linux, etc. But it’s also about mindshare. It’s the soul of the old Red Hat, and is the part of Red Hat where the most open, honest, back-and-forth work happens.Are there business customers running Fedora? Anecdotally, if you go to Wikipedia you’ll see that it’s Fedora (mostly) that runs the site. There are a number of organizations that use RHEL and Fedora in tandem (with Fedora in the staging and QA environments). So, yes, but it depends on how you define “business use.” And the Fedora dorm room users of today will be the Fortune 1000 IT customers of tomorrow. It’s important to win those customers early.Talk to me about Ubuntu. Lots of traction. Is it a competitor?More Linux use – whatever the flavor – is a great thing. Now, if I put my Fedora-only hat on for a moment, Fedora has an open, robust build system/tool chain that allows a customer to spin a highly tailored version of Fedora. Ubuntu is very good at producing multiple versions of its own OS (niche products), but the process by which these are created still feels like a bit of a black box. Fedora is more focused on open tools to allow people to build their own niche. How many Fedora systems?Unique IP addresses looking back to Fedora for updates show up to 3 million Fedora Core 6 installed systems, but this may include double counting [and, frankly, it may undercount systems, too, that don’t ping back for the updates].Why would anyone outside of Red Hat contribute to Fedora? Fedora has more package maintainers that don’t work for Red Hat than that do. Some of the most innovative Fedora work has been done by non-Red Hat paid community members, including the Fedora Infrastructure Project (at least, up until February 2007). Why does the community contribute? It’s all about relationships. The people on Red Hat’s payroll have, over time, proven that Red Hat is not the Fedora community, but rather is just another important member of that community. Half the Fedora Community Board is made up of non-Red Hat employees. Outside developers like the fact that Fedora is a popular community, so that they don’t have to build from scratch. Assuming they can have an impact with Fedora, there’s really no reason to go elsewhere. My job is to make sure that community people who see Fedora for the first time see that they can make strong contributions without working for Red Hat, and that their voices will be heard and matter. Fedora 7 introduces a completely new way for how the product is built. Development now happens outside the Red Hat firewall. Fedora benefits from Red Hat’s involvement, but is not dependent on it.There are lessons in Max’s words for all those (like I) that need to build community around a company. “Let go” seems to be the crutch of it. Hard words to live by, but they seem to be paying off for Fedora. Open Source