The other day marked the fifth anniversary of Fedora, one of the most renowned Linux distributions of today. Absolutely free to download, use, distribute and modify, Fedora is an operating system that provides access to the most recent open source technologies. The name "Fedora" means “God's gift” and has Russian origins, while also meaning "hat" in Italian.

The Fedora Project appeared towards the end of 2003, exactly at the time when Red Hat Linux discontinued its community release, and concentrated solely on the Enterprise edition. Fedora Linux, the volunteer project that contributed to some extent to the Red Hat Linux distribution, was then absorbed into the now very popular, worldwide community collaboration called the Fedora Project.

Fedora has become a headquarter for developers and open source fans alike, by creating a community that facilitates and encourages rapid innovation in free and open source software. Everything that gets done within the Fedora, including important builds, is brought to the open source world, broadening the community even more.

Fedora stands for much more than just software, as it represents a community of contributors spread all around the globe, who share thoughts and ideas to further expand the influence of the free culture movement. The Fedora community welcomes anyone who is interested in enriching the project in any way, as there is room here for writers, software engineers, web designers, translators, artists and system administrators.

The basic principles of only creating and providing free software, which anyone can use and redistribute or modify, are strongly instated in the fundamental Fedora philosophy, therefore the development team makes all their work available for anyone, and provides early access to changes. Much progress in open source technologies is made at Fedora, and important developments have been finalized, such as:

· NetworkManager;
· D-Bus;
· PolicyKit;
· PackageKit;
· HAL;
· FreeIPA;
· SELinux;
· PulseAudio.

Also, Fedora usually has access to the most recent software, by working close to the upstream development teams, thus benefiting both the Fedora community and the upstream teams, who, this way, are granted more and earlier user feedback.

Download the latest Fedora version from Softpedia.