As was just announced on the announcement mailing list*, the voting ballots for the Fedora 11 release name are now open. To vote, you just need to be a member of one non-CLA group in our Fedora Account System. Voting ends at 2359 UTC 2009-01-09, so get your vote in quickly! (There’s nothing wrong with campaigning for a name of your choice either, if you’re so inclined.)
The Fedora release name is sort of a fun Easter egg for the community. Ultimately, it’s simply a way that anyone who participates in Fedora can have a say in what we call the next release. For Fedora 10, that name was “Cambridge,” which incidentally was Red Hat engineering’s internal release name for the Red Hat Linux 10 product that never was. That release ultimately became Fedora Core 1, “Yarrow.”
All the names on the ballot were submitted by the community, run through a series of searches to identify probable trademark conflicts, and then approved by the Fedora Board and Red Hat’s legal department, which did a more thorough search for conflicts and risk identification. The entire submission process was recorded on the wiki, where you can find details on all the suggestions.
Each release name is linked to the previous release name, and that link must be different from the link that came before it. We try to keep the links non-obvious and (arguably) clever wherever possible. In the past, the links have become a little more generic, but given the fairly good slate of names that’s on the ballot this time, I hope that will be less of an issue going forward.
Thanks again to Nigel Jones for coordinating our election process and to everyone who submitted a name for consideration!