[Ambassadors] Greetings from Sherbrooke, Québec

[Oisin Feeley]

Hello Ambassadors,

I'd like to introduce myself to the Ambassadors group. I'm Oisín Feeley
and am writing from Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada. I've been involved with
GNU/Linux since 1995 with the majority of that experience devoted to Red
Hat and latterly Fedora. I started experimenting with GNU/Linux when I
was a student programming in C using Borland's IDE for Windows and also
using Solaris-2.4(SunOS-5.4). On the recommendation of a colleague tried
Emacs, gcc and gdb on Red Hat Linux 2.0. It was a revelation both in
terms of the workflow and the amount of knowledge freely shared
(especially in contrast to the clunky, expensive knowledgebase I had to
subscribe to in order to find out about Microsoft Foundation Classes and
the impact of the price of Sun's compiler on the laboratory budget). 
Soon I was sucked in to the excitement of trying different Linux
distributions and after some fun with Debian and Slackware settled back
on Red Hat Linux. Although I experimented actively with other
distributions and had work requirements to support Debian I remained
impressed with the commitment of the Red Hat to hire the best developers
producing Free Software (for example with the acquisition of Cygnus) and
ended up taking the RHCT and RHCE. The foundation of the Fedora Project
and its support by Red Hat continues this trend of a successful
enterprise carefully nurturing the base of Free Software in which it
thrives. 

Currently I work supporting Fedora, CentOS and Debian for some small
businesses. I'm also involved in developing modules for Drupal (using
JavaScript and PHP) for an education-sector company. Within the Fedora
Project my contributions centre on writing the Development Beat for
Fedora Weekly News. I also participate as part of the editorial team of
FWN.

I would like to raise the profile of Fedora where I live. Currently most
Linux activity seems to be centred on Ubuntu and there are
misconceptions and misunderstandings about what Fedora can offer. This
area of Canada is predominantly francophone which adds an extra
challenge to my task as I'm originally an English-speaker (from
Ireland), mais je suis étudiant en français!

Best wishes,
-- 
  Oisin Feeley
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley