Red Hat contributions to Free and Open Source software
Red Hat has contributed extensively to Free and Open Source software. A partial list of software that Red Hat has contributed towards include the following.
Red Hat has a similar page with many more details on its involvement, and a list of projects that Red Hat is heavily involved with.
Fedora Project
Red Hat is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and provides hosting, engineering and other resources. It has several hundred active developers participating and leading the project in different ways in coordination with the volunteer community members. It is a highly successful model pionoreed by Red Hat within the Fedora Project that has inspired several other distributions like OpenSUSE and free software projects like MySQL and OpenSolaris.
Upstream Focus
Fedora Project has a strong focus on not deviating from upstream as much as possible in all the different software it includes in the repository. The following is a general set of best practice guidelines on why this is a good idea, tips for sending your patches upstream, and the potential exceptions Fedora might make. The primary goal is to share the benefits of a common codebase for end users and developers while simultaneously reducing unnecessary maintenance efforts.
Proprietary Software Freed
- Sistina GFS file system, LVM2 and associated clustering tools acquired for 31 million dollars and completely released as Free and open source software
Netscape directory server open sourced as Fedora/Red Hat rectory Server - Around 25 million dollars and are completely released as Free and open source software. More information about Fedora Directory Server.
Netscape Certificate System open sourced as the Dogtag certificate system. More information about Dogtag certificate server.
GNOME and the Free Desktop
Fonts
Lohit Indic Fonts
Liberation fonts which provide Free and unrestricted metric equivalents to key Microsoft fonts
Desktop Software
- Firefox: we added support for the GTK+ and GTK+2 toolkits. Pango support, GNOME Integration. Current upstream contributions include security patches, and co-ownership of various linux-specific pieces of the project.
gnome.org infrastructure, hosting and bandwidth
- pango: originally written and maintained
- glib, gtk+: most primary maintainers and developer work
- metacity: written and maintained
- nautilus: co-maintained
- gnome-panel: co-maintained
- gnome-session: maintained
- vte: written and maintained
- cairo: written (employee) and maintained
- gconf: written and maintained
- dbus: written (employee) and maintained
- hal: written (employee) and maintained
- Avahi: maintained
PulseAudio: maintained
- gnome-keyring: written and maintained
- gnome control-center: co-maintained
- evince: written and maintained
NetworkManager: written and maintained
OpenOffice.org: fontconfig font/glyph fallback, headless plugin, xdg-userdirs, email-mailmerge backend, MSWord 2.0 filter, gcj port of Java dependencies, ppc64 port, co-author on gnome dialogs, x86_64 port, ...
- vino: written and maintained
- gnome-menus: written and maintained
- sabayon: written
dogtail - UI automation and testing framework
- Xorg: major contributions and maintenance.
AIGLX: Compositing desktop framework.
The Core Operating System
coreutils - maintained
- LVM2, md
- Autofs - maintained
- SELinux - Maintains User space tools, Targeted policy, MCS
- Kernel 2.6 Audit subsystem - written and maintained
- ipsec
- crypto
- ext3 - Written and maintained
- vfs- Written and maintained
- usb - patches
- Kernel 2.6 Virtual Memory manager - Written and maintained
- kernel 2.6 CPU scheduler - Written and maintained
- netdump and netconsole
- NPTL - Written and maintained
- Tux - Written and maintained
- several SATA drivers
- Several network drivers
- Network stack
- parted - co-maintained
- grub
Key Open Source Development Tools
- glibc - Major contributions. Maintained.
- gcc and gcj - Major contributions
- binutils -
- elfutils - Written and maintained
- libuser
"libxml2 and libxslt" development - Written and maintained
gamin - FAM replacement library done within Fedora - Written and maintained
Gnulib - GNU Portability Library - Major contributions. Maintained.
- Eclipse
Autotools plugin: written and maintained
RPM Specfile editor: written and co-maintained
- On-going work to ensure upcoming 3.4 release works for Linux distributions
- Continues long-standing work in same vein
Administration Frameworks
- RPM - Written and maintained
- up2date - Written and maintained
- anaconda - Written and maintained
- firstboot - Written and maintained
- system-config-tools - Written and maintained
- yum - Maintained
- func - Written and maintained
System Clustering
- gfs - Written (Sistina) and maintained
- gfs2 - Written and maintained
- dlm - Written and maintained
- gulm - Written and maintained
- cman - Written and maintained
- rgmanager - Written and maintained
- ccs - Written and maintained
- fence - Written and maintained
- system-config-cluster - Written and maintained
- gnbd - Written and maintained
- dmraid - Written and maintained
- bddraid - Written and maintained
- csnap - Written and maintained
- JFFS2
Service Management
- booty - Written and maintained
- chkconfig
- initscripts
- kudzu - Written and maintained
- MAKEDEV
- mkbootdisk
- mkinitrd - Written and maintained
- ntsysv - Written and maintained
- rhpl - Written and maintained
- rootfiles
- sysreport - Written and maintained
- sos - Written and Maintained
Internationalization
- Lohit Indic Fonts - Upstream.
- AR PL Uni Chinese Fonts
- SCIM Input Framework
- gettext
- Anthy Japanese Engine
- Chewing Chinese Engine
SCIM PinYin Chinese Engine
- SCIM Hangul Korean Engine
- M17N Indic Engine
- PAPS text printing filter
Emerging Technologies
A list of emerging technology projects developed by Red Hat.
- Supporting Xen virtualization
- SELinux MCS
libvirt interface for virtualization - Written and maintained
One Laptop per Child Creating operating system, designing and implementing both UI and drivers.
Other
- cdparanoia - maintained
References
Who wrote 2.6.20? Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2c1895%2c2121087%2c00.asp - Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology