History of the "Fedora Project" and "Fedora Commons"™ Names

What's in a name? As part of a brand that impacts stakeholders' perceptions of value — plenty. The "Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture" (the first letters of these six words comprise the word "Fedora") is software that has been known by its acronym — Fedora — from its inception. The prototype of the software was the product of a research project that was begun in 1997, by Sandy Payette and Carl Lagoze. Payette created a reference implementation of a system that demonstrated the architecture and made it publicly available on a web site at Cornell University in 1998. [1] Payette and Lagoze also published several papers about their work at that time in professional journals. [2,3]

In 2000, Thornton Staples and Rosser Wayland, of the University of Virginia Library, published an article in D-Lib Magazine [4] on their work to create an implementation of Payette and Lagoze's Fedora architecture that demonstrated how such a system could be built that would scale to manage 30 million objects.

In 2001, the Cornell and Univeristy of Virginia teams joined their efforts and secured funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. [5] This partnership led to the first public open source release of software under the Fedora name in May of 2003. By January 31, 2005, the Cornell-UVA Fedora Project had released five versions of their software. [6]

When Red Hat, Inc. filed a trademark request for the name "Fedora" to be associated with their Linux operating system project in 2005, Cornell and UVA formally disputed the request. As a final settlement, all parties settled on a co-existence agreement that stated that the Cornell-UVA project could use the name when clearly associated with open source software for digital object repository systems and that Red Hat could use the name when it was clearly associated with open source computer operating systems. The transferable agreement stipulated that each project must display the following text on their web site:

Red Hat, Inc. offers open source computer software for operating
computer systems under the mark FEDORA Project. The FEDORA
Project of Cornell University and the University of Virginia is not
affiliated, connected, or associated with the FEDORA Project of Red Hat,
Inc. Red Hat, Inc. does not sponsor, approve of, or endorse the FEDORA
Project of Cornell University and the University of Virginia.

Fedora Commons,™ Inc. was founded by Cornell University and the University of Virginia in 2007, to be the permanent home for Fedora software created collaboratively by their joint project.

1. Payette, S., Lagoze, C., "Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA)," Second European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 21-23, 1998, Springer, 1998, (Lecture notes in computer science; Vol. 1513). http://www.cs.cornell.edu/payette/papers/ECDL98/FEDORA.html
2. Payette,S., Blanchi C., Lagoze, C., Overly, E., "Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories: The Cornell/CNRI Experiments," D-Lib Magazine, May 1999. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may99/payette/05payette.html
3. Payette, S., Lagoze, C., "Policy-Carrying, Policy-Enforcing Digital Objects," Fourth European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Portugal, Springer, 2000, (Lecture notes in computer science), draft available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/payette/papers/ecdl2000/pcpe-draft.ps
4. Staples, T., Wayland, R., "Virginia Dons Fedora: A Prototype for a Digital Object Repository," D-Lib Magazine, July 2000, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/staples/07staples.html
5. Proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fedora Phase 1, http://fedora.info/documents/proposal.shtml
6. Payette, S., Staples, T., "The Mellon Fedora Project: Digital Library Architecture Meets XML and Web Services," Sixth European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2459. Springer- Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg New York (2002) 406-421. http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/papers/2458/24580406.pdf