[Ambassadors] Greetings!

[Harish Pillay]

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I thought I should send a shout out to the Fedora Ambassadors list.

I am Harish Pillay and have been in the FOSS space for a really long
time.  I first came across free software back in 1986 or so when FSF
shipped a tape containing emacs to my school, Oregon State University.
I was intrigued by what it offered and over the next few years, got involved
because the options available then (OS/2, windows 286, windows 386)
were just not interesting enough.

Eventually, in the early 1990s (91/92), I started looking at the BSD project
for 386s and also came across Linus' post on comp.os.minix which
was interesting from the point of view of being a Unix-like operating system
being developed outside the US.  That, to me, was crucial as it meant that
some of the archaic regulations of the US then (no export of crypto) did
not apply.  I got more and more involved with Linux and in 1993 helped
found the Linux Users' Group (Singapore).

To cut the long story short, fast forward about 10 years and after a few
startups of which some went spectacularly bust, I am glad to be able to
engage with the FOSS community all the while.  In 2003, I helped set up
Red Hat in Singapore and have been with them since.

The last 5 years have been an amazing journey (and it still continues to
be) and my role within Red Hat is to help drive the community and the
Fedora group for Asia Pacific a geographical region which Red Hat defines
as every country east from Pakistan including ANZ, Japan, Korea, China etc).

I have had the privilege in organizing 4 Linux conferences (1999, 2000
and 2001 called the Singapore Linux Conference and in 2003 called the
Asian Enterprise Open Source Conference) as well as participating in
the Asia Open Source Software Symposium from 2003 onwards.

My passions are in pushing for both open standards and open source
solutions everywhere.  I try to achieve them by working with national
bodies in Singapore and the south east Asian region where possible.

All in, I am hoping to be a catalyst like all of you Fedora Ambassadors.
The world of FOSS is here, it is just not evenly spread out yet.

Thanks.
- --
Harish Pillay h.pillay at ieee.org gpg id: 746809E3
fingerprint: F7F5 5CCD 25B9 FC25 303E 3DA2 0F80 27DB 7468 09E3
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