As part of its patent reform

Jun 3, 2005 20:39 GMT  ·  By

As we all know, Fedora it is a version of Linux, born in 2002, when Red Hat decided to turn its Linux distribution into a commercial product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Since 2003 when the first version was shipped, Feodora become an open source project sustained by Red Hat.

But Friday Red Hat decided to create new entity, called Fedora Foundation and to the turn over copyrights and development work to this new project.

Red Hat also announced the version 4 of Fedora which will include broader processor support, the Xen software for running multiple operating systems on one computer, version 4 of the GCC compiler, and other features.

According to a company statement "Red Hat will still provide substantial financial and engineering support, but this move will assure broader community involvement in Fedora-sponsored projects," the company said in a statement. Also Red Hat's deputy general counsel, Mark Webbink, announced that Red Hat is creating what it calls a Software Patent Commons to encourage sharing of patents.

"We need to move away from a system of software patents compromised by trivial, incremental enhancements that block innovation to a system that is aimed at rewarding substantial innovation," Webbink said in a statement. "Patents are not equal to innovation. More often, innovation occurs despite patents."