I became a Fedora contributor after experiencing what I felt was a highly polished distro and outstanding support from the Fedora user community. I had attempted to become a contributor for another distro, but the process required to do so ended up being so long and difficult that I just gave up and moved on.

While trademarks are often lumped together with copyrights and patents—under the poorly termed "intellectual property" umbrella—trademarks are quite different. One of those differences is that a trademark must be actively enforced, at least under US law, or the mark holder risks losing it.

Red Hat has hired Fedora contributor Jared Smith to appoint him as Fedora Project Leader

For the last two years Max Spevack has lead the Fedora Project through many changes. Now, he has decided it's time for him to move on to other areas and so a new leader has been found: Paul Frields. Paul, coming into the role from the position of a community contributor, is already well known and has some exciting new ideas resulting from his previous experiences. In this interview we catch up with both Max and Paul as they discuss their experiences of the Fedora Project Leader job, the project's past and its future.

The next version of Fedora is now to be released on the 25th of May. This year the annually awarded Fedora scholarship goes to long-standing contributor Ian Weller

Fedora (previously called Fedora Core) is an RPM-based, general purpose Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora's mission statement is: "Fedora is about the rapid progress of Free and Open Source software."

The Fedora project has always offered installation options. The best known of these options are the Fedora spins -- roll-your-own install images that emphasize a particular desktop or purpose, such as providing the distribution's complete repository on DVD.

The Fedora Project offered a peek under its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of time after its release.

The Fedora Project has gotten a new look prior to the Fedora 7 launch. Take a look to learn more about the OS and how developers, writers and artists can contribute to Fedora.