Red Hat has just appointed a new project leader for Fedora. Jared Smith, an active member of the community with experience in similar positions at other companies, will be replacing the current leader Paul Frields. Smith will be overseeing the development of Fedora 14 which Frields has already gotten under way.

Jared Smith has been a long-time user of both Red Hat and Fedora, and has been an active participant in the the Fedora community since 2007. He has primarily spent his time working with the infrastructure and documentation teams, the official announcement reads.

He has helped with the development of Fedora Talk, our community VoIP telephony system. Fedora Talk allows various Fedora developers and contributors to communicate verbally for free across the Internet. Jared has also participated in community events such as various FUDCons and Fedora Activity Days, it added.

Its not just his involvement with Fedora that recommends him. Red Hat says Smiths previous jobs at Digium, creators of the Asterix PBX and VoIP software, and at Omniture, the analytics company acquired by Adobe, were also considered. Smith will head the development of the upcoming Fedora 14 “Laughlin” and will host the FUDCon starting July 15.

Hell be working as a full-time employee of Red Hat, which sponsors the Fedora project. Paul Frields, which oversaw the development of Fedora 9 through 13, will start working internally with the company at Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat uses the community-driven project to spearhead new technologies and test new implementations that later includes in the professional or enterprise editions of Red Hat Linux. Red Hat is the biggest commercial developer of Linux and is a close to $1 billion business. It makes money selling support and services for its RHEL releases which are popular on the enterprise front. It uses some of that money to fund the development of Fedora. However, Fedora is still an independent and community-driven project.