Overview

What is the Fedora Project?
The Fedora Project is a partnership of free software community members from around the globe. The Fedora Project builds open source software communities and produces a Linux distribution called "Fedora."

Our Mission
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.

Elements of Fedora's Mission
The three elements of this mission are clear:


 * The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow.
 * The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and spread free/libre code and content.
 * The Fedora Project succeeds through shared action on the part of many people throughout our community.

User base (also known as target audience)
Among our other goals, we strive to create a distribution that is not only open to contribution but also serves the needs of a wide audience of users. By meeting the common needs of a wide audience, Fedora encourages the spread of free software, understanding of its methodologies, and participation in its processes.

Our Core Values
The Fedora Project's core values, or Foundations, are set out on their own wiki page.

We strongly believe in the bedrock principles that created all the components of our operating system, and because of this we guarantee that Fedora will always be free for everyone, everywhere, to use, modify and distribute.

Our Community
Fedora is more than just software, though. It is a community of contributors from around the world, including volunteers and Red Hat employees, who work with each other to advance the interests of the free culture movement. Everyone is invited to join and, no matter what your skills are, we have a place for you in our community! The Fedora community includes software engineers,  artists,  system administrators,  web designers,  writers,  speakers, and  translators -- all of whom will be happy to help you get started.

We believe that all contributors should "be excellent to each other." By creating an environment for constructive contribution, we can more effectively and successfully compare and challenge different ideas to find the best solutions for advancement, while building the size, diversity, and strength of our community.

Our Method
Fedora is a center for innovation in free and open source software, and creates a community where contributors of all kinds -- developers, documenters, artists, system administrators, and other free software and open source enthusiasts -- come together to advance the ecosystem for the benefit of everyone. The Fedora community contributes everything it builds back to the free and open source world and continues to make advances of significance to the broader community, as evidenced by the regular and rapid incorporation of its features into other Linux distributions. Regardless of which Linux distribution you use, you are relying on code developed within the Fedora Project.

Our Governance
Like any large community, Fedora provides several leadership components to help identify ways to improve, and to resolve conflicts on technical, organizational, and social levels. The goal for community leadership is to provide the minimum oversight required, and the maximum encouragement to community members to succeed in furthering the Fedora Project's shared goals. For this reason, governance of the community largely comes from the community itself. The Leadership page is a good place to start if you want to read about the primary governance entities in Fedora, and how they work.

Why Is the Fedora Project Different?
We try to always do the right thing, and provide only free and open source software. We will fight to protect and promote solutions that anyone can use and redistribute. To this end, we use only free and open source software to power the Fedora infrastructure itself. With this in mind, all of our developers are focused on working closely with upstream development teams, so everyone can benefit from our work and get access to our changes as soon as possible. Due to the huge amount of innovation that Fedora drives, this focus has had significant and long lasting effects. Some of the recent developments in free and open source software that Fedora has driven include:


 * NetworkManager
 * D-Bus
 * PolicyKit
 * PackageKit
 * FreeIPA
 * SELinux
 * PulseAudio
 * systemd

The reverse is also true: by sticking close to upstream development teams, Fedora often gets the latest software before anyone else. Not only does this benefit our community, but it also benefits the upstream teams by providing a much larger audience and more feedback for them.

Another striking difference of Fedora is our goal to empower others to pursue their vision of what a free operating system should be. Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions  such as  Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the  One Laptop Per Child XO, and Creative Commons' Live Content  DVDs.

And that's not all. It is just as easy for individuals to create their own distribution, thanks to Fedora's easy remixing tools. These tools allow you to quickly select the packages you want, and create live images for CD/DVD or USB, or installation discs. Some official versions, or what we call "spins," of Fedora have grown up this way, including:


 * Fedora Electronic Lab (installable Live DVD)
 * Fedora Xfce Spin (installable Live CD)
 * Fedora Games Spin (installable Live DVD)

We believe software patents are harmful, a hindrance to innovation in software development, and are inconsistent with the values of free and open source software. While tightly integrating proprietary and patent encumbered components might superficially improve ease of use, this practice does not benefit the community in the long run. The Fedora community prefers approaches that benefit the progress of free software in the future over those that emphasize short term ease of use.

Joining the Fedora Project
Like what you see and want to help out? That's easy too! This page has all the information you need, and don't forget that all our contributors get access to some awesome tools to help them get their work done:


 * Fedora People provides free webspace for hosting Fedora related content
 * Fedora Planet is an aggregation of contributor blogs so you can see what everyone is up to
 * Fedora Hosted is the perfect location for hosting your free and open source projects
 * Fedora's own  Gobby server, so we can collaboratively work on documents in real time
 * Fedora  Build System  to build your software across multiple architectures
 * The skills and experience of hundreds of fellow Fedora contributors!

What is the Fedora Distribution?
Fedora is a ﻿Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable,  secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

How do I get the Fedora Distribution?
Easy, just visit this page and download it. You can try it without installing anything on your computer, thanks to our Live images on CD or USB - in fact, you can even create a Live USB stick from within Windows!

If you have a slow internet connection, or no internet connection at all, then you can still get Fedora thanks to our volunteer Free Media  program.

Where does it come from?
From a community of people who want to put great free software to work around the world. Got something you want to do with Fedora? Download a copy and try it!