Objectives

The Fedora Project is a work project where individuals and organizations can collaborate. To work together, we need to understand and agree on what we're working toward. To build a meritocracy of community leadership, we need a document describing our goals.

Red Hat will provide a lot of development resources for Fedora Core, and will provide editorial control and management, but for it to be a successful community project we have to explicitly state what Red Hat's goals are. Anyone is free at any time to fork this project, to go off and build their own distribution based on Fedora Core, just as many people have built distributions based on Red Hat Linux in the past. For Red Hat to participate in this project, Red Hat's own goals have to be met by the project. This doesn't mean that other goals cannot be met as well (except where they explicitly conflict with Red Hat's own critical goals), but the goals that Red Hat expresses define our "contract" with developers and users of Fedora Core.

Objectives of Fedora Core:

Create a complete general-purpose operating system with capabilities equivalent to competing operating systems, built for and by a community — those who not only consume, but also produce for the good of other community members.
Build the operating system exclusively from open source software.
Do as much of the development work as possible directly in the upstream packages. This includes updates; our default policy will be to upgrade to new versions for security as well as for bugfix and new feature update releases of packages.
Provide a robust development platform for building software, particularly open source software.
Be on the leading edge of open source technology, by adopting and helping develop new features and version upgrades.
Emphasize usability and a "just works" philosophy in selecting default configuration and designing features.
Promote rapid adoption of new releases by maintaining easy upgradeability, with minimal disturbances to configuration changes.
Include a range of popular packages, beyond those included in Red Hat's commercially supported products. (Limited, of course, to packages that Red Hat can legally provide; also limited to quality packages as defined by our standards.)
Establish and implement technical standards for packages to ensure quality and consistency of the operating system.
Produce robust releases approximately 2-3 times per year, using a time-based release model: A time for a feature freeze is set in advance, and an expected schedule for test releases is produced before the feature freeze date. (Important feature schedules will be taken into account when setting the schedule for Fedora Core releases.)
Provide timely (though not guaranteed — no Service Level Agreements apply) updates for robust releases, over a useful release lifetime.
Create an environment where third party packages are easy to add and positive encouragement and support exists for third party packaging.
Form the basis of Red Hat's commercially supported operating system products.
Promote a global perspective by supporting as many languages and geographic locales as possible.
Releases will always be available for free download in RPM, SRPM, and ISO formats.