[Ambassadors] Greetings from Sherbrooke, Québec

[Pawel Sadowski]

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 11:57 -0400, Oisin Feeley wrote:
> 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,

Welcome to the Ambassadors Family :)

Cheers and good luck,
Pawel Sadowski