Red Hat's Fedora Linux Operating System Gains New Leader

Fedora Linux, the open source, community-developed operating system sponsored by Red Hat (RHT), has a new head. On June 3, Matthew Miller, a longtime Fedora contributor with special expertise in cloud computing, became project leader.

As a community-based open source project, Fedora doesn’t have a CEO or other big-suit type of director. Instead, the project leader acts in a less formal role to lead the Fedora Project board and help steer the Fedora community. The leader is, however, a salaried Red Hat employee.

Miller, who replaces Robyn Bergeron, has contributed to Fedora in a number of areas, but has been especially active in Fedora Cloud. He worked previously as a systems administrator for academic institutions.

Miller’s appointment as project leader comes in the midst of busy times and a changing landscape for Fedora. Late last year, the project pushed out a feature-rich new version of the operating system. And earlier this year, the Fedora community began planning major changes to the project in the form of Fedora.next. Developers are now pursuing a release model in which they will offer different versions tailored to different types of deployments—namely workstations, servers and the cloud—rather than the one-size-fits-all releases they have traditionally produced.

The fruits of all of the recent activity within the Fedora world should begin to become evident in the Fedora 21 release, which will appear sometime this fall if all goes as planned.