ten billion butterfly sneezes

Being a geek for hire has its rewards. Sometimes. these rewards include meeting luminaries in the Open Source Community. Last week, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting two such folk.

On Tuesday, I shook the hand of Paul Frields , current chairman of the Fedora Project Board. In just the few short minutes I spent talking with Paul, his passion for Open Source and the communities it has fostered became clear. Talking with him crystallized the notion that Fedora, far from being an I installed it on my old 386 in the basement, d00dz! And it roxx0rs! project, is actually a proving ground for new ideas, new applications, many of which wind up appearing in a Red Hat release near you. I wouldn’t stand up a full datacenter’s worth of Fedora servers; at home, I run nothing but Fedora. I like seeing what’s ahead, and I want to get as much of a leg up as I can. And much of what I learn from Fedora gets plowed back into my RHEL-centric workday life. Paul also told me how to pass the proper kernel option to see Fedora’s magnificent Plymouth graphical boot screen in all its glory.

On the next day starting with “T”, Thursday, I met with and attended a presentation by Dan Walsh, SELinux guru. Dan’s almost two-hour presentation, done without slides, overhead projectors and other such mainstream trappings, consisted of him standing in front of a whiteboard, explaining the workings of SELinux, its history, what went right, what went wrong, and where it’s headed. His knowledge was encyclopedic, his passion obvious. I remembered my college days, wherein I hung on every word of a revered professor. I especially enjoyed his including us in his comment, “We’re all a bunch of Unix graybeards here”. Truth hurts, sometimes.

If there’s a common thread here, both Paul and Dan exuded passion for their work, for wanting people to know about their work, and for soliciting input. That passion extends to “If there’s something you want to discuss, e-mail me. Ping me on IRC.”

Thanks to you both. For all my years as a sysadmin, I feel like a total neophyte sometimes. In a run what you brung world, I hope I brung enough.
-k-