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.
Source : betanews
The foundation is expected to be set up by mid-August and will operate as a nonprofit 501 (c) (3) organization, said Mark Webbink, deputy general counsel at Red Hat. "It will be governed by an independent board that we don't control," he said.
Source : inforworld
Computer Business Review reported that Red Hat has announced plans to hand over control of its Fedora community led Linux development project to the new Fedora Foundation as part of a new three pronged intellectual property strategy." As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation.
Now: This is in addition to the recent announcement by Red Hat to release the recently procured Netscape Directory Server from AOL as part of it's Fedora offering.
I guess it's RedHat's hard spun effort to lure the Open Source community back. Well, Talking about opensource I bet you all know about java.net, Brazil, OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, JINI, JXTA, Grid Engine, JRMS, NetBeans. . Now. That's a true Open Source Community !!! For a Complete list of Open Source Projects that Sun is involved in; CLICK HERE.
This whole topic reminds me of Ian Murdoc's post on "Red Hat Enterprise linux Is Proprietary" from almost a year ago.
I bet that though the Fedora Directory Server has been opensourced, Red Hat WILL NOT, release the admin console bits as part of the offering. Well; for starters, thats the MOST desirable component organizations would like to obtain for managing the directory server. If it was just the backend LDAP server, there's always openLDAP. Speaking of LDAP servers, What i'd really like to see if a benchmark report on the following: Fedora Directory Server, openLDAP, Microsoft's Active Directory and Sun's Java Enterprise Systems Directory Server. (I just cant wait to see that).
With Open Source Software being the wave of the current / NEXT generation, I would like to close with a line from Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer "There has never been a more interesting time to be in the information technology industry than right now. I guarantee that the impact of the IT industry will be (greater) in the next 10 years than over the last 10."
With all this said, the LINE to really remember & remember for a long long time is Jonathan Schwartz's :