[Ambassadors] Event report: Shmoocon (Also tagged as Shnowcon)

[Yaakov Nemoy]

Hey Ivan

2010/2/8 Ivan Makfinsky <ivan.makfinsky at endosys.com>:
> This past weekend I attended Shmoocon in Washington, DC. It happened to
> coincide with a massive winter storm that dumped over two feet of snow
> on the area.

<snip>

> Most security folks seem to use either Ubuntu, Debian, Backtrack or
> (oddly) OSX. Many of the comments with regard to Fedora seemed to be of
> the effect, "I ran it back in the Fedora Core {2,3,4,5} days and it was
> too much work to get it to a usable state." Many folks were either happy
> to get a LiveCD or honest enough to let me know that they probably
> wouldn't even try it.
>
> Since most of the presentations were about vulnerabilities in this or
> that technology, I am not sure if I should be glad that Fedora wasn't
> mentioned or saddened that I didn't see anyone using Fedora other than,
> well, me. I did give out nearly all of the LiveCD's, half the install
> DVD's, buttons and case badges that I had.

<snip>

I've been taking Fedora around to a few hacker events too, and your
assessment is more or less spot on. I don't see it necessarily as a
bad thing either, i think Debian is in a better position to cater to
that market anyways.  On the flip side of the coin, when they organise
Debian conferences in the US or a few other particular countries, the
event organiser has a whole write up for them exactly how to talk to
the border police, the phone number and address of a lawyer who's been
contracted for the event and a whole host of other details in order to
make sure that Debian hackers are not arrested at the border. If
you're interested in promoting Fedora at such an event, keep in mind
that you're going to be promoting it to a group that works wholly
differently than the current Fedora user and dev base. Which is also
not a bad thing.

The strategy i favour when talking about Fedora is a bit different.
Since i'm usually doing this at hackercamps, i don't go to hackercons
as much, i'm not really focusing on evangelism at all. Yes, we have
Fedora CDs, schwag, and Fedora coolness, yes you are more than welcome
to come hang out with us, but we'll agree to disagree about which
distro is better and go back to drinking beer. Of course after a
couple of beers, the conversation comes around to Fedora's stance on
Freedom and the work that Fedora contributors put into it. People also
talk about Fedora's commitment to upstream. I think it's more
important to make sure Fedora is seen from this point of view and that
people look at in an honest way.

Remember, because Fedora is not as widely used there, you're really an
Ambassador in a foreign country. If you're looking for the people that
use RH based distros though, talk to sysadmins, many of them are more
familiar with CentOS and RHEL.

-Yaakov