The Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux distributor said its plans to create the Fedora Foundation with the intention of moving Fedora project development work and copyright of contributed code outside of its core business.
Red Hat’s general counsel, Mark Webbink, announced the plan at the company’s Red Hat Summit in New Orleans as the company stated that it wanted to broaden community involvement with the Fedora project.
Originally set up in July 2003, the Fedora project was designed to open up the development of the freely available Red Hat Linux operating system to a community of developers, as Red Hat concentrated its attention on the subscription-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux package.
Red Hat retained editorial control over the renamed Fedora Linux project, and Red Hat engineers continued to contribute to the development of the operating system, which forms the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
While Red Hat maintains that it will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support to the Fedora Foundation, its creation will allay potential fears among the Linux development community that by contributing to Fedora they were effectively handing copyright for their work to the company.
The announcement of the Fedora Foundation came as Webbink discussed Red Hat’s calls for the reform of intellectual property and patent policy. The company has already called for reform of the US patent system and engaged in the ongoing debate over software patents in Europe, and is now intending to protect open source by creating a Software Patent Commons.
The company said that a Software Patent Commons would enable increased collaboration and sharing among open source developers. Patents do not equal innovation, said Webbink. More often, innovation occurs despite patents. What we observe today in the software industry is the use of patents to maintain market share.
The idea of a patent commons to protect open source software was first put forward by IBM Corp in January of this year as it offered open access to open source developers to 500 of its patents.
We will increasingly use patents to encourage and protect global innovation and interoperability through open standards and we encourage others to do so as well, said IBM senior vice president of technology and intellectual property, John Kelly, at the time.
Red Hat had previously promised not to use its patent portfolio against open source projects. At this stage it is not clear whether Red Hat and IBM will work together on creating the patent commons, but there is a growing number of vendors using patents to protect open source developments.
Earlier this month Nokia committed not to assert any of its current patents against any existing Linux kernels, while in October 2004, Novell vowed to use its patent portfolio to protect open source products against third-party patent challenges.
Meanwhile, Computer Associates in March confirmed that it intends to pledge a number of its patents to the open source community to remove any perceived threat against the Linux operating system, although it is yet to detail the plan.
