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If you didn’t get to attend FUDCon last month, the community made several exciting announcements including the availability of Fedora Talk, the new Fedora telephony system. Based on the free VoIP project Asterisk, Fedora Talk allows Fedora contributors to use any standard VoIP hardware or software to sign into the Fedora system and make and receive calls to other Fedora contributors.
Fedora contributors can set up ad hoc conferences, further deepening social connections and creating a more efficient method for communication when working on certain projects. In the future, we hope to add web conference capabilites for anyone with VoIP access. There are other possibilities to explore with Fedora Talk as well. What if, in the future, a Fedora volunteer could claim an hour of time to run a VoIP phone and answer user or contributor questions?
Fedora Talk is further enabling the community and providing another vehicle to bring our worldwide contributor base closer together. A special thanks to Digium, the company behind Asterisk, which has provided SIP handsets to many members of the Fedora infrastructure team, engineers and Fedora team leaders operating in remote areas across the globe. We also want to thank our hosting and bandwidth provider, Server Beach, and also Arrival Telecom for their donation of several dial-in numbers in the US and the UK. » Read more
While Red Hat executives, developers, partners, and customers are gathering at the Summit next week, there’s an additional event running simultaneously. From Thursday, June 19, to Saturday, June 21, we’re holding a Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) in Boston. There you’ll find the Fedora community brainstorming, planning, and hacking on the future of our free, leading edge, community supported platform.On Thursday and Friday, FUDCon will be co-located with Red Hat Summit at the Hynes Convention Center on the third floor. We’ll be holding “hackathon” sessions all day long that extend over many workgroups in several rooms in the FUDCon space. You can stop by, introduce yourself, and meet world-class developers, designers, and system administrators. Ask about the features or platform enhancements they’re working on. Heck, you might even want to roll up your sleeves and get involved when you meet some of the brainiacs behind Fedora. In addition, you won’t want to miss Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat President and CEO, who will be stopping by FUDCon on Thursday at 4:00 p.m. » Read more
A little more than two weeks after the release of Fedora 9 and we’re certainly making waves with strong download numbers. At almost exactly the one-week mark, Fedora 9 saw about 15 percent more downloads than Fedora 8 received during its first week. While this is an impressive number, Fedora is continuing to experience growth in other areas too.
Every statistic showing our community’s size and involvement is rising steadily, and we continue to gather these statistics using open, transparent methods. We are seeing enormous success in growing a community of not just open source consumers, but open source contributors. Since the debut of our new Fedora Account System, the number of account holders has increased dramatically, and well over 75 percent of our contributors are non-Red Hat employees. We’re also happy to report that the number of volunteer representatives in our global Ambassadors program has risen to over 350 members. During the coming months, we’ll be placing high emphasis on expanding Fedora’s reach in Europe with former Fedora Project Leader Max Spevack moving to the Netherlands to manage our community efforts. His counterpart in the Asia-Pacific region is Harish Pillay, a Red Hat associate based in Singapore.
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The attacking left forward fakes his body to the left as he gracefully slides to the right around his opponent. Dribbling carefully into position, he sizes up the Australian goalie, who, he recalls, tends to play a little aggressively to one side, especially in that last match against Italy. An opposing fullback closes in and the forward ducks the move, falling back slightly and eyeing the goalie’s stance. Finally he sees his chance as the goalie shifts his weight – the forward takes the shot – he scores! The world championship is won by the challengers! The crowd goes wild…the photographers’ bulbs flash…and the forward returns to the locker room, to find an electrical outlet into which he can plug himself to recharge his power cells.
Are you intrigued and thinking: “What?!? A team of robots playing soccer…and beating a team of humans no less?”
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At the end of March, members of our Fedora Project team set out on the 2008 North American University Tour to spread the word about free software and Fedora. We want to make sure that the important principles of open source software are highlighted in universities around the world as they develop their computer science curriculums that will breed our future software contributors, so we decided to go directly to the source – students and faculty.
We made stops in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, California and lots of places in between – see our full schedule. Basically, our aim was to raise the awareness of Fedora and open source software among the university communities with the hope that many of those that we touched will become active supporters and contributors to the Fedora Project.
We’ve gotten some great feedback from both students and faculty at the Universities where we stopped, and Jack Aboutboul, one of our Community Engineers that has been making the rounds, has some great anecdotes to share about some cool happenings, like Carnegie Mellon planning to install Fedora on computers in its Bill Gates building. Check out the blog about Jack’s travels for more.
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If you’re curious about what might be included in the next version of Fedora — Fedora 9 Sulphur, due out in late April 2008 — today’s Beta release gives a good glimpse into what’s ahead. The Beta release signals the feature freeze for the next release, meaning that all major features that we plan to include have to either be complete or in a testable state. It’s aimed at our developers and early adopters, but everyone in the community is given the opportunity to give feedback to improve our latest and greatest cycles. Testing of the Fedora 9 Beta release is really simple because with live media images, you don’t need to install anything.
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Free software is becoming increasingly popular with non-technical users and, as a result, good documentation is becoming more important. The greatest barrier to achieving good, free documentation has not been a lack of interested contributors, but the difficulty of the tools required to create and manage regularly updated and complex documents.
Thankfully things have just got a lot easier: Publican has arrived. Red Hat’s documentation team has been using this tool, which automates the process of creating all the files needed to begin a new document, as well as exports the finished content into many of the most common formats including HTML and PDF. Now they’ve opened it up to the world and it is being hosted by the Fedora Project, whose own documentation team is set to adopt it.
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As Fedora contributors, one of the most exciting parts of the development process of new Fedora distributions is determining which cool, new features are included in the next release. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) is due out at the end of April 2008, and we started making plans for it as soon as we released Fedora 8 back in November. We’ve been implementing the changes we want included in this release, and with the Fedora 9 Alpha release today, it’s time for the whole community’s input. Obtain your Alpha live spin here.
During each Fedora cycle, there is an Alpha release, a Beta release and a series of weekly snapshot releases. The Alpha release gives everyone the opportunity to provide feedback on the work that has been done so far as the first step in the testing cycle. It’s the first time that the larger Fedora community can get really involved in testing out the new features and is encouraged to provide input on what’s working, and what’s not. It’s easy to gain access to the Alpha release because you don’t have to install any software — everything you need is provided through live CDs. Then, to give us feedback, you can file bug reports and enhancement requests and make other recommendations.
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Now that we’re a few months past the Fedora 8 release, and we’ve produced another successful FUDCon, this time in Raleigh, NC, the time has come for our current Fedora Project Leader, Max Spevack, to hand off his role to a new advocate. We welcome Paul Frields, who will assume this role in February.
Max first joined the Fedora team two years ago, about one month before Fedora Core 5 was released. Only a few people within the Fedora community knew him, but he had been a Fedora user and working for Red Hat already for a year and a half in the Red Hat Network group. Now, he’ll remain involved in Fedora and Red Hat’s community efforts.
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From Friday, January 11 through Sunday, January 13, the Fedora Project will be holding its annual FUDCon event at Red Hat’s Raleigh, NC headquarters.
FUDCon is the “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” — a time when members of the Fedora community who usually only communicate via email or IRC have a chance to meet in person. FUDCon includes two full days of hackfests, in which specific technical problems are worked on in small group code sprints, as well as one day of talks, sessions and presentations that are of interest to a variety of users and developers.
The second meaning of FUDCon is to stand opposed to the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that opponents of free software often try to promulgate.
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