From Code to Community to Enterprise-Ready

The weather is getting colder and leaves are changing color in the northern hemisphere, signaling the start of fall. Much to our delight, this also means that the latest version of Fedora is expected to be available soon! Released approximately every six months (generally around May Day and Halloween), Fedora 12 is expected to be loaded with new feature functionality and continue to advance free and open source software and content.

Red Hat’s software development model relies on its active sponsorship of leading open source projects, including the Fedora Project, which produces the Fedora distribution. Fedora combines and showcases the latest in open source technologies anyone can download, use, and remix, and also serves as the technology foundation of Red Hat’s commercial products. By providing cutting-edge technology, Fedora helps advance the development of open source worldwide, and the technologies found in Fedora may be incorporated later into other Linux distributions as well.

There are many features that started in Fedora and are now included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. PackageKit and PolicyKit are two prime examples. PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software easier, through a set of easy-to-use command-line and graphical utilities. It also integrates software management with desktop activities like clicking on packages or entering commands in a terminal. PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling the rules by which unprivileged processes can speak to privileged processes. It also provides a framework for centralizing these access policies for use in managed environments.

PolicyKit first debuted in Fedora 8, and PackageKit in Fedora 9, and have been refined upstream thanks to the wide exposure they receive first in Fedora. They are expected to debut in a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release where customers will also benefit from these refinements.

We’re counting down the weeks until Fedora 12 is released. Keep your eyes peeled for a series of blogs highlighting some of the cool features we anticipate in Fedora 12.