STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: The rewards of open source; How Fedora, Red Hat's free Linux distro, solicits innovation from the community.(O'Reilly Open Source Convention)

Last week, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Michael Tiemann -- formerly Red Hat's CTO and now vice president of open source affairs -- spoke about the role of Fedora, Red Hat's free Linux distribution. To refute the claim that Fedora represents a fork of its core product, Tiemann appealed to a notion that is best summed up in a phrase popularized by Tim O'Reilly: "the architecture of participation." To meet the needs of the enterprise customers who pay Red Hat's bills, Tiemann said, it was necessary to slow the release cycle and create "a massively long release runway on which Oracle, and Veritas, and BEA, and all these other guys could actually land." But the solution …