Yesterday, like thousands of other people, I downloaded a copy of Fedora 7 and installed it. In the past I’ve always had to download a few CDs or a huge DVD – and a lot of people are doing that – but this time I just used the Fedora 7 LiveCD. It’s just so much simpler to just drop in a pre-configured desktop and just start using it. (Hats off to Klaus Knoppix who really started the idea of using the livecd. I can’t believe how long it took for us to do this. You were so far ahead of us, Klaus.)
The new theme, fonts and graphics in Fedora 7 are just stunning. Many thanks to the Fedora Art team who did a great job on all of this. So many small improvements. My news reader of choice, liferea, got a major upgrade and it’s so much more pleasant to use.
But of course, these are not the most important qualities of Fedora 7. The qualities that I’m interested in are somewhat intangible. What this release represents is a first step down a long path. Fedora is no longer something that just Red Hat produces. Those of us who work for the company have been long since eclipsed by the sheer number of people involved in Fedora from outside of the corporate firewall. It’s simple: Fedora is now an open source project. What’s interesting to me is how long we’ve been able to say this – a few months at best – but the number of people that have shown up who show a unique passion for the success of the project is just amazing. For a good view of some of them check out the Fedora Award Winners for 2007. Every one of those guys just showed up and started making a difference.
Just some simple examples of this:
Check out the yum presto work by Jonathan and Ahmed. Being done entirely by community folks and based on the original deltarpm code (that I think SuSE originally did?) they aim to integrate it directly into the Fedora base. I’m hoping that we get this landed in our next release so that people downloading updates will save roughly 75% of the bandwith costs involved in doing an update. This will be huge for our user base. And it’s being done entirely by some rocking Fedora community folks.
Another great project by a different set of people: Chunks of code from Pirut, the livecd utils and yum and managed to put together a tool that anyone can use to put together their own spin of Fedora. With the growing depth of software lovingly maintained by hundreds of people, you can really make a livecd or distribution that does exactly what you need. And if you need a fixed package in Fedora to support something new or different, you can just jump in an participate. No more barriers. This is the perfect expression of what being an open source project means.
Max talks about the new release. But I think this is the most interesting bit:
Red Hat, Fedora, Fedora Wiki, Fedora Docs, Fedora Planet, torrents, etc. Everything is still up, and (at least as far as I can tell) as fast as always. And the even better part is, that there was almost zero downtime along the way.
Credit for this falls completely into the hands of our very dedicated, and very skilled Fedora Infrastructure team.
Did you know that almost all of the people on that team are volunteers? Did you know that the volunteer group that we have is so geographically diversified that we almost have 24×7 sysadmin coverage of Fedora infrastructure machines?
It’s awesome. Fedora’s infrastructure is largely volunteer-driven. Lots of Xen instances running in a data center with people who care keeping things healthy and alive. What could be a better indication of the health of a project?
As I said, Fedora 7 is a great start. With improving support for laptops, a large and growing base of developers and packagers, a commitment to free software and led by passionate people, I can’t think of a better position we could be in to make a difference in the future.
