Fedora 15 Goes Gold, and That's Not All

Several exciting announcements came out of the Fedora project today, the most exciting of which is that the Fedora Go / No-Go meeting resulted in a Go. In addition, the new Contributor Agreement was finalized and posted. A newish community project made its existence widely known as well.

After the Go / No-Go meeting yesterday an announcement went out to the Fedora Developer Announce mailing list that version 15 "is declared GOLD!" A Release Readiness meeting will take place Thursday to make sure the release is coordinated and that all teams are in agreement and ready for the release.

During the Go / No-Go meeting a few issues were discussed such as some upgrade issues. It was said that particular proposed blocker isn't reproducible, which is a relief considering Adam Williamson's comment that "we don't require yum upgrades to work." In any case, reviews for Fedora 15 will certainly be interesting, especially for those performing upgrades from Fedora 14 to 15.

The most notable of the Fedora 15 features is the move to GNOME 3. GNOME 3 was met with mixed reactions and this is another reason to look forward to Fedora 15 reviews. Some of the other features include KDE 4.6.x, Xfce 4.8, GCC 4.6, a change to LibreOffice, removal of Setuid apps, improved SPICE support, /var/run and /var/lock mounted as tmpfs, and systemd. Fedora 15 is due May 24.

Developers will have to sign a new Project Contributor Agreement by June 17 in order to continue working on Fedora projects. The Goal of the new agreement is to "ensure that contributions to Fedora have acceptable licensing terms." The types of acceptable licenses are those typically thought of as protecting Open Source, but not necessarily GPL compatible. These include the Affero General Public Licenses, Apache Software Licenses, Apple MIT License, several BSD Licenses, CDDL, Creative Commons, European Union Public License, Mozilla Public License, MySQL License, and, of course, the GPLs. The full list is located at the Fedora project Wiki.

In another twist in today's Fedora news, the Pulp project made itself known. Pulp, a Red Hat community project, could help with the enormous task of updating and sending out updates to and from software repositories. It certainly seems like this project has been in the works for a while, but posts to the blog just emerged on the Fedora planet today. In fact, the latest released is dated May 4. It supports Fedora 13, Fedora 14, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. More information can be found at the Pulp Website.