If you don’t know what an ISV is, then you aren’t part of one. Independent software vendors are everyone from Red Hat to small two-person coding boutiques. They are a group in the business world that has specific needs and problems, which may or may not match with the other needs we have in general open source communities.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/ISV_Welcome
ISVs have always been a part of open source and Fedora, but there are a number of changes over the past eighteen months that have drawn a lot of attention to Fedora from ISVs.
One of these is the creation of the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository. ISVs can have their open source packages ready to install to RHEL 4 and 5 environments without having to spin up the development, packaging, and delivery infrastructure. They also gain immeasurably by being part of the Fedora community and getting a six to twenty-four month head start on their testing for the next version of RHEL.
Another important milestone is the arrival of OpenJDK 6 in Fedora and EPEL, which is now certified as 100% Java. Because of the need to compile everything from source in Fedora, we were previously limited by what applications could get working under gcj. Having a certified Java in Fedora and EPEL is an open invitation to Java web application developers and ISVs that specialize in that software.
If you are part of an ISV or otherwise interested in seeing them succeed in Fedora, join the ISV SIG, especially the mailing list. The purpose of the list is to discuss the issues special to ISVs, with technical discussions happening in the usual places.