Fedora Project Leader Robyn Bergeron has announced the results of the naming vote for Fedora 18. The poll used the range voting method and, out of a possible 3432 votes, 1359 were cast in favour of "Spherical Cow". All in all, 429 people voted in the poll.

With Fedora 17 "Beefy Miracle" being close to release, the next version of Fedora, which will start development soon after, will therefore be named "Spherical Cow". It has been a long standing tradition in the Fedora Project that release names must have some sort of connection to their predecessor, but that rule was somewhat weakened when "Beefy Miracle" was chosen as a name. The connection this time around is the fact that neither a "Beefy Miracle" nor a spherical cow have never been observed in the real world.

The idea of a spherical cow originally stems from the fact that there exists a tradition in physics simulations to model spherical cows as a simple actor within the simulation. This in turn goes back to a joke that makes sport of the fact that theoretical physicists tend to solve problems by reducing the factors of an equation down to their simplest base form possible in order to reduce complexity within their calculations. Thus cows are reduced to a spherical shape.

It is currently still being decided whether Fedora should have release code names going forward. An opinion poll on the matter indicated that a majority of contributors were in favour of keeping the release names.

(fab)