The past is prologue, indeed.

Back in late 2006, we in Fedora land were already looking toward a future where anyone could draw bits out of Fedora and make what matters to them. By the time Fedora 7 came around in May 2007, we were already talking about the remix.

The “remix” term has a long and colorful history that’s decades old, as the art of producing them passed down from the music industry, to professional DJ’s, to independent members of the overall free culture movement. In a way, the term itself, and the emergence of the “remix culture,” shows how the concept of re-using and building on knowledge and art has become a major game-changing concept around the globe.

Fedora has always embraced the free software and culture movements, so with tools like pungi, livecd-tools, and revisor, our developer community made it easy for their fellow community members to disassemble and reform Fedora like Voltron. Any community should be able to form around a specialized remix with the tools they want to combine. In the past, we’ve officially hosted some of these remixes as spins, and our Spins SIG continues to grow and provide technical guidance and a body of knowledge on making good remixes.

But the step that we’ve needed, to cap everything off nicely, is a way for these downstream communities to point effectively back upstream to Fedora. So for the last couple of months, among my other projects, I’ve been working on a new set of trademark guidelines that allow remixes of Fedora to carry a new secondary design mark, reminding users and consumers where the toys get made. It’s my hope that this will encourage a slew of new Fedora derivatives that show off the cool technologies we often premiere in Fedora.

Thus far we have some wording for the mark, “Fedora Remix,” thus combining the long history of the remix concept, and our introduction of the remix distribution back in 2006-2007. We also have some preliminary designs by the Artwork team (yet to be approved, but very good progress so far!). My hope is that we’ll have the final touches on this work within the next several business days, so stay tuned!