Fedora continues to encourage open source consumption and contribution across next generation of users; Names inaugural college scholarship recipient.

Seneca College students in the School of Computer Studies will work
within the Fedora Project while learning open source development and administration. As the principles and methodologies of open source are changing the software industry, Red Hat and Seneca College are committed to driving change through new models of computer science education.

Fedora, and Redhat before it, has held a special place in my heart for years, being that Redhat Desktop was the very first Linux distribution I ever used, and the one I kept coming back to during my programming classes in college.

We’ve partnered with Seneca College, one of the leaders in instituting open source software into its coursework, to bring Fedora to the classroom. Members of the Fedora Project team also went on the road last spring to talk to students and faculty at top computer science schools during the 2008 North America University Tour.

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.

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 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.

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

Where most computer science departments emphasize theory and mention free and open source software (FOSS) only indirectly, Seneca College in Toronto, Canada, offers a different approach: a hands-on introduction to the community in partnership with the Mozilla and Fedora projects.