They own and maintain the website, the servers, and all physical infrastructure used by the Fedora project.
The Fedora Project Leader is a Red Hat employee (constitutionally they always have to be). The Fedora Operations Architect and Fedora Community Architect are also Red Hat employees.
7 of the 9 Fedora Community Council members are Red Hat employees.
The upshot of it all is that Red Hat has full effective control of the project, is the sole main funding sponsor, and has full control over the use of the name, brand, and public image. And of course the main downstream beneficiary of the Fedora codebase is Red Hat/IBM.
Technically they don’t own the code itself (because it’s open source), but if that’s your metric then no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone.
Technically they don’t own the code itself (because it’s open source), but if that’s your metric then no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone.
That’s what I mean. You could fork the entire codebase today and start your own thing. Yes, that would be a massive undertaking, but we’re not talking about volunteers trying their hand at being Red Hat, we’re talking about governments with real resources to throw at it.
And I agree that no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone. That’s kinda the point. The larger community allows “ownership” for various reasons, but many projects can be and do get forked and spun into different things.
Yes, they kind of do.
Red Hat own the Fedora name, brand, and logos.
They own and maintain the website, the servers, and all physical infrastructure used by the Fedora project.
The Fedora Project Leader is a Red Hat employee (constitutionally they always have to be). The Fedora Operations Architect and Fedora Community Architect are also Red Hat employees.
7 of the 9 Fedora Community Council members are Red Hat employees.
The upshot of it all is that Red Hat has full effective control of the project, is the sole main funding sponsor, and has full control over the use of the name, brand, and public image. And of course the main downstream beneficiary of the Fedora codebase is Red Hat/IBM.
Technically they don’t own the code itself (because it’s open source), but if that’s your metric then no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone.
That’s what I mean. You could fork the entire codebase today and start your own thing. Yes, that would be a massive undertaking, but we’re not talking about volunteers trying their hand at being Red Hat, we’re talking about governments with real resources to throw at it.
And I agree that no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone. That’s kinda the point. The larger community allows “ownership” for various reasons, but many projects can be and do get forked and spun into different things.