In 2007, Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, hit an all-time low. Users were leaving it behind in favor of Ubuntu and openSUSE Well-known Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond, after looking at the latest release, Fedora Core 6, dismissed Fedora as junk.
Raymond wrote at the time, “Over the last five years, I’ve watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what a near-unassailable lead was at one time in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.”
Two years later though, Paul Frields, Fedora project leader, declares that there has been “a major up-tick in Fedora involvement over the last 6 months. Since the release of Fedora 10, we’ve seen about 1 million new installations and approximately 2 million unique visitors to fedoraproject.org each month. We are very pleased about the number of contributors and interest that we are seeing in the Fedora Project, and we intend to build on that enthusiasm at FUDCon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) Berlin.” FUDCon is an annual community event, which will be held this year between June 26-28th in conjunction with LinuxTag, Europe’s leading Linux and open-source gathering and tradeshow.