[Ambassadors] Speaking engagement at Northeastern University report

[Jesse Keating]

I've just returned from a speaking engagement at Northeastern University
here in Boston MA., USA.  This was for the ACM students, Association of
Computing Machinery.

Even though it was midterms time, we had a good 30 students show up for
the talk.  I started with a quick history of Linux and GNU and a brief
outline of what makes a Linux distribution.  I then went on to compare
and contrast some of today's popular Linux distributions, going over
package management, init systems, governance models,
commercial/community aspects, etc...  I then went further in detail as
to what makes up Fedora, and why I feel that Fedora is a very strong
project to contribute to.

After that I did about 30 minutes of question and answer.  Many good
questions were asked, such as what is RH/Fedora's relationship with
CentOS, how do we compete with Ubuntu, what return on RH's investment
in Fedora is there, how does the Fedora work make it's way into RHEL,
what is RHEL's release model, and a few other things.

All in all I think it was a very good engagement.  The students were
very knowledgeable and interested.  Many expressed interest in getting
more information, and potentially interning or otherwise contributing
to Fedora.  Every student picked up a Live CD of Fedora 8 as well.

I hope to do more things with Northeastern in the future.  They have a
very cool program and some very neat students.  Linux is slowly making
it's way into their infrastructure, mostly led by student efforts.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours?
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