In his March 23 blog, Frields announced that he was giving up his Fedora project leader role and "branching out into other ways of championing free and open source software at Red Hat."

Frields didn't reveal the exact date, but he wants the transition to the next Fedora project leader (FPL) to be as smooth as possible and will continue to provide support for the FPL to be "fully successful." It's likely that the date will be after the Fedora 13 release in May 2010.

Frields's predecessor, Max Spevack, ruminated in his own blog about the role of the active FPL and couldn't help mentioning from his own experience how important transitioning can be:

"Fedora does not have, and never should have, a 'benevolent dictator for life'. Reading Paul's post and talking to Paul over the last few weeks has reminded me how much I enjoyed being the FPL, and what an honor it was to have the opportunity to earn the respect and trust of the Fedora community in that role."

Fedora 13, code-named Goddard, is meanwhile making steady progress. As Fedora program manager John Poelstra announced, the accepted features listed in the Fedora wiki for the release are almost all completed. A few notable exceptions among the candidates are GNOME 2.30, GNOME Color Manager and Moblin 2.2. Poelstra encouraged the respective maintainers to update the wiki to reflect the current feature complete state. A team decision about the incomplete features is likely to come around March 28.