Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat announced plans to create the Fedora Foundation in June 2005 to increase community involvement in the Fedora Project and allay potential fears among the Linux development community that by contributing to Fedora they were effectively handing over copyright for their work.
Despite going as far as creating the legal entity, drawing up bylaws, and appointing a temporary board for the foundation, Red Hat has now abandoned the plan, according to a posting to the Fedora announcement list by Fedora Project chairman, Max Spevack.
The six-page posting tackles the issues in detail and explains that additional research indicated that a foundation was not the best method for achieving some of Fedora’s goals, while other projects have developed at a rate that made its role as patent commons unnecessary.
What we weren’t counting on was the rapid progress of the Open Invention Network, which serves a similar purpose for businesses in a much more compelling way, wrote Spevack of the patent protection organization launched in November by Red Hat, Novell, Sony, and Royal Philips Electronics.
Another potential benefit that had been mooted was the ability of a foundation to act as a single standing for legal issues, protecting individual Fedora developers from legal claims. That would require developers to assign their copyright over to the foundation, according to Spevack, making it unsuitable for the foundation’s projects.
Another plan to set up the Foundation as a fund-raising entity for projects considered non-core by Red Hat also ran into problems, this time thanks to non-profit tax requirements, which require charities to raise one-third of their funds from public sources within four years. That requirement would put undue burden on Red Hat to identify and value every contribution it made to the foundation, and would also mean that every time Red Hat invested in the Fedora project, the foundation would be required to match one-third of that investment.
Despite canceling the creation of the foundation, Red Hat said it is still keen to increase community participation in decision-making and to enable Fedora to be more independent.
With that in mind it has reconstituted the Fedora Project Board to include five Red Hat members and four community members, as well as Spevack, who as Red Hat-appointed chairman has veto power over any decision.
It’s our expectation that this veto power will be used infrequently, since we’re all aware of the negative consequences that could arise from the use of such power in a community project, said Spevack, while noting that Red Hat depends on Fedora as the basis of its Enterprise Linux distribution, contributes staff and resources to the project, and accepts legal risk for the project.
Many of the key governance details related to the new leadership model have yet to be decided but are expected to be decided by the new board in consultation with Fedora members at the forthcoming FUDCon event in Boston.
