With Fedora, Red Hat recreates its lost community

[Renew Deal]

Open source project seeks input

By Johan Bostrom, IDG News Service
February 22, 2005

With the open-source Fedora project, Red Hat is aiming to rebuild its links to the open source community and regain that community's input for its innovation process. The developers and users now contributing to the Fedora project -- which a Red Hat (Profile, Products, Articles) executive credited with providing the starting point for the company's latest Enterprise Linux release -- had their first-ever meeting at a conference on Friday in Boston.

Until the launch of the Fedora effort in 2003, users had no direct impact on Red Hat's software development process, and some of those users considered that to be to the company's detriment.

"Suddenly they released Red Hat Linux 7.0, which was a big disappointment," said Ed Hill, a post-doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), looking back at Red Hat's attempt to keep research and development within its walls. "They would have committed suicide if they had continued with that model."

Today, Hill and his group at MIT are using both Red Hat and Fedora software for what he calls their "ugly math computing." Hill is also part of the Fedora community, contributing his own code.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/02/22/HNredhatfedora_1.html?source=NLC-TB2005-02-23