From Fedora Project Wiki
Red Hat contributions to Free and Open Source software
This documented in maintained by Rahul Sundaram. Feel free to edit the wiki or contact the maintainer for any kind of feedback.
Red Hat has contributed extensively to Free and Open Source software. A partial list of software that Red Hat has contributed towards include the following.
Red Hat has a similar page with many more details on its involvement, and a list of projects that Red Hat is heavily involved with.
Fedora Project
Red Hat is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and provides hosting, engineering and other resources. It has several hundred active developers participating and leading the project in different ways in coordination with the volunteer community members. It is a highly successful model pionoreed by Red Hat within the Fedora Project that has inspired several other distributions like OpenSUSE and free software projects like MySQL and OpenSolaris.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Enterprise is a open source product based on Fedora that is commercially supported by Red Hat.
Upstream Focus
Fedora Project has a strong focus on not deviating from upstream as much as possible in all the different software it includes in the repository. The following is a general set of best practice guidelines on why this is a good idea, tips for sending your patches upstream, and the potential exceptions Fedora might make. The primary goal is to share the benefits of a common codebase for end users and developers while simultaneously reducing unnecessary maintenance efforts.
Linux Kernel
Red Hat is the largest contributor and Red Hat developers are the leading contributors.
Xorg
Red Hat is also the largest contributor to Xorg according to this report.
Proprietary Software Freed
- Sistina GFS file system, LVM2 and associated clustering tools acquired for 31 million dollars and completely released as Free and open source software
- Netscape directory server open sourced as Fedora/Red Hat directory Server - Bought for around 25 million dollars and is completely released as Free and open source software. More information about Fedora Directory Server .
- Netscape Certificate System open sourced as the Dogtag certificate system. More information about Dogtag certificate server .
eCos
Red Hat donated all the eCos copyrights to FSF
GNOME and the Free Desktop
Fonts
- Lohit Indic Fonts
- Liberation fonts which provide Free and unrestricted metric equivalents to key Microsoft fonts
Desktop Software
- Firefox: we added support for the GTK+ and GTK+2 toolkits. Pango support, GNOME Integration. Current upstream contributions include security patches, and co-ownership of various linux-specific pieces of the project.
- gnome.org infrastructure, hosting and bandwidth
- pango: originally written and maintained
- glib, gtk+: most primary maintainers and developer work
- metacity: written and maintained
- nautilus: co-maintained
- gnome-panel: co-maintained
- gnome-session: maintained
- vte: written and maintained
- cairo: written (employee) and maintained
- gconf: written and maintained
- dbus: written (employee) and maintained
- DeviceKit: written and maintained
- hal: written (employee) and maintained
- Avahi: maintained
- PulseAudio: maintained
- gnome-keyring: written and maintained
- gnome control-center: co-maintained
- evince: written and maintained
- NetworkManager: written and maintained
- ["OpenOffice.org"] : fontconfig font/glyph fallback, headless plugin, xdg-userdirs, email-mailmerge backend, MSWord 2.0 filter, gcj port of Java dependencies, ppc64 port, co-author on gnome dialogs, x86_64 port, ...
- vino: written and maintained
- gnome-menus: written and maintained
- sabayon: written
- dogtail - UI automation and testing framework
- Xorg: major contributions and maintenance.
- AIGLX : Compositing desktop framework.
- virt-manager: written and maintained
The Core Operating System
- coreutils - maintained
- LVM2, md - maintained
- KVM virtualization- developed and maintained
- Autofs - maintained
- SELinux - Maintains User space tools, Targeted policy, MCS
- Kernel 2.6 Audit subsystem - written and maintained
- ipsec - maintained
- crypto - maintained
- ext3 - Written and maintained
- vfs- Written and maintained
- usb - patches
- Kernel 2.6 Virtual Memory manager - Written and maintained
- kernel 2.6 CPU scheduler - Written and maintained
- netdump and netconsole
- NPTL - Written and maintained
- Tux - Written and maintained
- several SATA drivers
- Several network drivers
- Network stack
- parted - co-maintained
- grub - development
Key Open Source Development Tools
- glibc - Major contributions. Maintained.
- gcc and gcj - Major contributions
- binutils -
- elfutils - Written and maintained
- libuser
- "libxml2 and libxslt" development - Written and maintained
- gamin - FAM replacement library done within Fedora - Written and maintained
- Gnulib - GNU Portability Library - Major contributions. Maintained.
- Eclipse
- Autotools plugin : written and maintained
- RPM Specfile editor : written and co-maintained
- On-going work to ensure upcoming 3.4 release works for Linux distributions
- Continues long-standing work in same vein
Administration Frameworks
- RPM - Written and maintained
- up2date - Written and maintained
- anaconda - Written and maintained
- firstboot - Written and maintained
- system-config-tools - Written and maintained
- yum - Maintained
- func - Written and maintained
- cobbler - Written and maintained
System Clustering
- gfs - Written (Sistina) and maintained
- gfs2 - Written and maintained
- dlm - Written and maintained
- gulm - Written and maintained
- cman - Written and maintained
- rgmanager - Written and maintained
- ccs - Written and maintained
- fence - Written and maintained
- system-config-cluster - Written and maintained
- gnbd - Written and maintained
- dmraid - Written and maintained
- bddraid - Written and maintained
- csnap - Written and maintained
- JFFS2
Service Management
- booty - Written and maintained
- chkconfig
- initscripts
- kudzu - Written and maintained
- MAKEDEV
- mkbootdisk
- mkinitrd - Written and maintained
- ntsysv - Written and maintained
- rhpl - Written and maintained
- rootfiles
- sysreport - Written and maintained
- sos - Written and Maintained
Internationalization
- Lohit Indic Fonts - Upstream.
- AR PL Uni Chinese Fonts
- SCIM Input Framework
- gettext
- Anthy Japanese Engine
- Chewing Chinese Engine
- SCIM PinYin Chinese Engine
- SCIM Hangul Korean Engine
- M17N Indic Engine
- PAPS text printing filter
Emerging Technologies
- Supporting Xen virtualization
- SELinux MCS
- libvirt interface for virtualization - Written and maintained
- One Laptop per Child Creating operating system, designing and implementing both UI and drivers.
Other
- cdparanoia - maintained
Key People
TODO - Add many more
This is not a comprehensive list of all developers but just the well known ones.
Linux Kernel
- Alan Cox - Core developer, innumerous contributions
- Ingo Molnar - x86 subsystem maintainer
- Al Viro - VFS subsystem maintainer, #1 committer according to LF report
- David Miller - Sparc Port maintainer, #2 committer according to LF report
- Jeff Garzik - Sata subsystem maintainer
- John Linville - Wireless subsystem maintainer
- Stephen Tweedie - Ext3 filesystem developer
- Eric Sandeen - XFS, Ext4 filesystem developer
- Josef Bacik - Btrfs filesystem developer
- Rik Van Riel - VM developer
- Ric Wheeler - Filesystem developer
- Val Henson - Filesystem developer
- Dave Jones - Fedora kernel maintainer
- Kyle McMartin - Fedora kernel maintainer
- Chuck Ebbert - Fedora kernel maintainer
Core components
- Ulrich Drepper - Glibc, lead maintainer
- Jakub Jelinek - GCC developer
- Roland Mcgrath - Glibc developer
Xorg developers
- Adam Jackson - Xorg release engineer and core developer
- Dave Airlie - Direct Rendering Infrastructure, ATI drivers developer
- Peter Hutterer - #1 Xorg committer, MPX (multi pointer X) developer
- Kristian Høgsberg - Compositing desktop (Underlying feature for Compiz) including AIGLX
- Kevin E Martin
- Rik Faith
- Søren Sandmann Pedersen
GNOME developers
- Mathias Clasen - GTK, lead maintainer
- Owen Taylor - GTK developer
- Dan Williams - NetworkManager lead maintainer
- David Zeuthen - DeviceKit/HAL, PolicyKit lead maintainer
- John Palmeri - D-Bus, lead maintainer
- Ray Strode - GDM developer
- Colin Walters - D-Bus developer
- Richard Hughes - gnome-power-manager, PackageKit lead maintainer
- Bastian Nocera - Totem, lead maintainer
- Dan Winship - core GNOME developer
- William Jon McCann - GDM. ConsoleKit developer
- Jonathan Blandford - early GNOME developer
KDE developers
- Than Ngo - Fedora KDE maintainer
- Lukáš Tinkl - Fedora KDE maintainer
References
- Linux Ecosystem - Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to a number of core projects including Linux, Xorg, GCC etc.
- Security Response - Red Hat's transparent and better security record.
- Who wrote 2.6.20? Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Who wrote - and approved - 2.6.22 Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Who wrote 2.6.23 Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- Where 2.6.25 came from Analysis showing Red Hat as the leading contributor to the Linux Kernel
- http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2c1895%2c2121087%2c00.asp - Linux Kernel Reaps the Fruits of Real-Time Technology