[Ambassadors] Speaking engagement at Northeastern University report

[Max Spevack]

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Jesse Keating wrote:

> 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.

Sounds like a great event, Jesse.  Sounds like a really good "intro to 
linux and open source with a fedora focus".  Did you have slides?  If 
so, could you make them available.

Thanks for writing this up -- I really like the fact that we're getting 
more Event Report activity on this list.

I haven't checked Fedora Planet in the last while, but maybe you could 
post there too, if you haven't already?

Thanks,
Max