The participating organization is Pardus (http://www.pardus.org.tr). Pardus is a Linux distribution development project under the auspices of TUBITAK UEKAE. TUBITAK (The National Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) UEKAE (National Research Institute for Electronic and Cryptography) is a government-run research institute in Turkey. TUBITAK (http://www.tubitak.gov.tr) is the scientific research funding organization of Turkey - a la NSF, and UEKAE is one of the research institutes of TUBITAK - a la Max Planck. TUBITAK UEKAE is located in Gebze, ca. 50 km from Istanbul, and has offices in Ankara as well. TUBITAK UEKAE has more than 500 researchers working in the fields of information security and cryptography.

Pardus project has a triad of goals: Developing Linux distribution for widespread use in Turkey and elsewhere, to have some sound financial sustainability even though the mother organization is a not-for-profit, and finally to develop a FOSS ecosystem in Turkey and elsewhere to innovate in Linux and related technologies. Pardus, the distribution, is the main tool to achieve these goals, and has, in turn, three fundamental requirements: Having full Turkish (i.e. mostly UTF-8) support, ease of use and installation, and a human-centric and task-based design approach (instead of a technology-centric and tool-based one).

Pardus project has been launched in Fall 2003 and the technical roadmap has been laid of in Fall 2004. The Pardus developers consist of 20 TUBITAK UEKAE employed core developers (18 full-time, 2 part-time) and more than 30 community developers. The product of the project, Pardus, is a free operating system, main pieces of which (and all the code developed within the Pardus project) are distributed under GPL license.