The Fedora Project Leader

The Fedora Project Leader (or FPL) is ultimately accountable for everything that happens within Fedora and in particular is responsible for maintaining Red Hat’s relationship with Fedora and vice versa. They are Fedora’s President, CEO, Chair, Fearless Leader, whatever-you-want-to-call-it. However the project leader is not a dictator, benevolent or otherwise. The FPL chairs the Fedora Council.

Jef Spaleta is the current Fedora Project Leader.

Jef has more than a decade of experience in the technology industry; as software engineer, open source contributor, IoT hardware developer, operations, and developer advocate. Prior to entering the technology industry as a paid professional, he was a plasma physics researcher. First in a Princeton lab work with fusion energy relevant experiments in New Jersey as a graduate student, and then pretty much everywhere but a lab building radars studying ionospheric plasmas as part of the SuperDARN international collaboration while living in Alaska. During his period as an academic researcher, he also was involved in the fedora.us repository as a contributor, which susequently merged with Red Hat’s effort to build what became the Fedora Project. Jef was even an elected Fedora Board member (the thing that pre-dated the Council) briefly before his trips to Antartica and elsewhere made it impossible for him to continue actively contributing to Fedora. Now he’s back serving the Fedora community after some time away.

He also curls..something he picked up in Alaska as a way to stay sane in the long winters there.