Maybe it was a one-line typo fix in the docs. Perhaps it was a package you’d been maintaining in secret for months before you finally submitted it. Maybe it was completely terrifying, or maybe it just felt like the most natural thing in the world. Whatever it was we want to hear about it.
Ahead of Flock to Fedora 2026 (June 14–16, Prague), We the Fedora CommOps team are launching #Commit History: a community campaign to collect the origin stories of Fedora contributors – the moments that brought people into this project and kept them here.
The best stories will be featured in a Fedora Magazine article published before Flock 2026, celebrating the people who make this project what it is.
Here are the questions used to get started-
- What was your first contribution to Fedora – and what made you take that first step?
- What did it feel like? What went wrong (or right)?
- Looking back, what did that moment mean for your open source journey?
There are no wrong answers. First commits come in all shapes code, documentation, translations, design, bug reports, community work. If you’ve ever contributed to Fedora, your story belongs here.
How to share: Drop your story in the comments below, or share it on Mastodon with the hashtag #Commit History.
Whether you’ve been contributing for a decade or made your first commit last week – we want to hear from you.
I don’t have a direct commit contribution, but word-of-mouthed using Fedora since 2016
I made some Coprs for Wine with certain patches: Making sure you're not a bot!
Not sure if there was a better way to go about managing the Copr, but I winged-it; for wine-patches Copr I have notes on how I uploaded packages to it, and after figuring that out I did it for the other repos.
My oldest commits that are currently distributed by the Fedora project predate Fedora.
I started contributing to Sabastiano Vigna’s ne - The Nice Editor project in early 1995 and still act as a co-maintainer of that project. At that time, my university was migrating our centralized research computing offering from an MVS mainframe to a large UNIX system, and we wanted to provide a more friendly editor than vi or emacs to these experienced but new-to-UNIX researchers — rather like Fedora provides the nano editor these days, only more powerful. Much later, ne became an official Fedora package, but it has been independently packaged as an rpm since shortly after RedHat Linux split to become Fedora and RedHat Enterprise Linux.
Also predating Fedora, this commit of my code from August, 2001 to the gnuplot project added a “smooth frequency” method to easily create histograms in gnuplot. I’m unsure when gnuplot was first distributed through the Fedora project, but it goes back quite a ways.
Having been a Fedora user since before Fedora became A Thing™, I’ve been occasionally creating and commenting on bugzilla entries the whole time. Project maintainers and other contributors have generally appreciated reports and suggestions, and I try to do the same for the ne project. These small contributions from so many individuals accumulate into an ever-improving whole, and I’m proud to have added a little bit to what Fedora has become.
Looking at my GitHub history, my first PR was opened against XBMC project, which is now known as Kodi, at 26th November 2016. I was just trying to fix something that annoyed me at that time (missing support for Beebox IR controller).
Regarding Fedora, my first PR happened on 6th August 2018, when I started working on release-monitoring.org. I was still learning the ropes of that project, but I was able to enhance the default regex being used by Anitya at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot! translations to anaconda into swedish 8th August 2020 as i was bored during COVID, before that my first early contributions was translations to Limewire, synaptic and help with KDE 3 for opensuse packaging and Thunderbird UX testing
My first contribution to Fedora was in 2023 when I packaged numberstation. I packaged it because there was no TOTP client that fit nicely on PinePhone’s screen and at that point I had already been running Fedora on my desktop for few years so I figure I’ll give something back.
Going through of Package Guidelines and all packaging related things, the first contribution felt a bit intimidating due the amount of information and the responsibilities which comes when you’re a packager.
I have been contributing to open source before my first Fedora contribution so this has been additional path for the journey as I have then gained maintainership of few mobile related packages.
I was running Red Hat Linux in the late 90’s for the Computer Science department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville before it split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux. We transitioned most of our servers to Fedora Linux since I was providing the support for the systems.
Git wasn’t around back then, and I’m not sure how far back Red Hat’s bugzilla reporting system goes, but this is the oldest bug report of mine that I could find with a quick search:
And it looks like I found a bug just now!
It is obvious that I’m the one who filed the above bug report, but somehow, Red Hat’s tracker has replaced my name with someone else’s in the initial post!