It's not RH/IBM, but you wouldn't know that because you didn't read anything about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46244011

From the website;

Name History

In 1997 a research project at Cornell University was named the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (FEDORA). In 1998, Payette and Lagoze published an article about their work referencing Fedora, and later that year software with the same name was released to the public.