Constructing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

In April 2004, Red Hat conducted a global company meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina. The entire company was invited. One of the strongest impressions I took from this meeting was how truly worldwide Red Hat is. It seemed as though there were as many non-US team members as US members. In addition to the US, development is conducted in Australia, Canada, Germany, Czech Republic, UK, Japan, India and Brazil.

Not all development is conducted within the offices of Red Hat. Through the worldwide legions of contributors to Fedora we invite broader participation. We actively contribute and draw from a great diversity of community open-source projects. Again, this substantially broadens the circle of participation. In many ways, this inclusive process makes Red Hat feel like a trusted steward of the community, forming a distribution representing the best and brightest technology. This is a privilege we do not take for granted as we know it needs to be continuously earned every day. This makes both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora truly distributions “by the people, for the people”.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4 is supported in 15 different languages. These translations are all performed as an integral part of the development cycle. Consequently, the translation process doesn't lag the release or introduce forks in the development trees. We have a team of “translation elves” located in Australia who magically do their work at an opposite phase of the clock from headquarters. This results in a nearly real-time translation that tracks development changes. Additionally, there are many contributors to Fedora who are actively involved in internationalization activities.

Figure 2. The Red Hat Crew from the Westford, Massachusetts Office

There are several ways in which Red Hat has improved upon our development methodology over the course of Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4's construction. Interestingly, the main theme of these improvements has been to stick to core proven Linux open-source development practices. Although we did subscribe to these practices previously, we paid increased focus this time around to the following:

We are all extremely grateful for the steady guiding influences of Donald Fischer who did an outstanding job as overall product manager and release manager. He was at once a diplomat, innovator, book-keeper and go-to guy. Hats off to “the Donald”.

Red Hat is truly a restless place to be. It seems that no sooner have we shipped one release, than we are already behind on the next one. This is due to the fact that in addition to new release development, we also support prior releases for a seven-year interval. So, for example, here's the list of releases concurrently in development now:

Never a dull moment, and we wouldn't have it any other way!

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