This is a presentation held at eLiberatica 2009. http://www.eliberatica.ro/2009/ One of the biggest events of its kind in Eastern Europe, eLiberatica brings community leaders from around the world to discuss about the hottest topics in FLOSS movement, demonstrating the advantages of adopting, using and developing Open Source and Free Software solutions. The eLiberatica organizational committee together with our speakers and guests, have graciously allowed media representatives and all attendees to photograph, videotape and otherwise record their sessions, on the condition that the photos, videos and recordings are licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike 3.0 License.

1. Fedora in the Enterprise
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 3.0 license.

2. Who is that guy?
Jeroen van Meeuwen, 25 years young
● Dutch
● Sr. System Engineer
● Fedora Project Ninja
● Fedora EMEA (NPO) - Vice-President
● Red Hat Certified Engineer of the Year

3. What is the Fedora Project?
Freedom, First, Features, Friends
Free, open and transparent culture
Leading Free Software innovation
Development, innovation, upstream
~13 million users

4. Why this talk?
Volunteers spend more time on development and innovation then
any company can ever afford. Why?
- because it's fun
- because it improves their skills
- because it's good for society
The Fedora Project spends lots of time and resources to advance
and integrate technology on the development end
Free Software vendors like Red Hat spend a lot of resources all
over Free Software support and innovation, their supply chain
Governments shift their resources to being spent at increased
efficiency through collaboration
You spend lots of time and resources to make Free Software
work for you, just the way you want it, on the consuming end

5. Free Software Community:
- 200.000+ separate projects
- divergent roadmaps
- millions of people
- thousands of mailing lists,
fora, bugzilla's
- no support
- no release cycles
Fedora Project:
- steady release cycle
- steady support cycle
- no true support
- platform for Free Software
development
- governance (meritocracy)
- guidelines
A snapshot of Free Software
Diagram Source: Red Hat

6. How does this work?
● Free Software develops new products
● Projects like Fedora take the Free Software product and stuff it in a
Linux distribution
● Millions of people get to use it for the first time
● Results from millions improve the Free Software product even
further
● You (government, business) get a taste when the product solidifies
into a supported Linux distribution
From point 0 to point 5 might take 6 years:
- Security Enhanced Linux released in 2001
- Major feature in Fedora Core in 2004
- Major feature in RHEL5 in 2007

7. What does Fedora do?
The Fedora Project adopts new products and new technologies
and releases those often and early
The Fedora Project thrives innovation by being a platform for
developers, while ensuring users and consumers can cope
with the changes fashionably
The Fedora Project strongly commits to upstream ensuring
continued long-term sustainability, continued development,
less diverging product releases, efficiency and awesomeness
for everyone, not just Fedora

8. What can you do?
Participate!
- ensure the future meets your needs and expectations
- have your voice be heard and directly influence development
- ensure your needs and expectations are met with future products
- assign (some of) your resources to participate in:
- testing (Fedora) releases
- developing (Fedora) components
- maintaining (RPM) packages
- troubleshooting software
- fixing software
Innovate!
- think of Free Software as yours already
- think of innovation as a service

9. Why should you care?
You are a consumer of Free and Open Source Software and rely on
the larger Free Software community as a core competency
Your participation:
- gets us a different perspective
The enterprise perspective vs. the user perspective
- gets you a sneak preview of what to expect for the (near) future
- gets you to participate efficiently, effectively
- ensures the next generation of supported Linux distributions meets
your needs and expectations
- makes you pro-active in pursuing your goals instead of reactive to
your software vendor
- enables you to take control of what you care about
- gets you / your employees ahead of the game

10. So what?
Studies show:
- 49% over 31% of students prefer creativity & innovation in
their future jobs rather then stability & security[1]
- Being on MySpace is more important then the way you sound[2]
- The proprietary software model limits innovation to 1/6th of it's
potential[3]
- I could go on and on and on..., but
Free Software has obsoleted traditional industrialization processes
within the software industry.
What the top industrialists could not achieve with proprietary
software and financial capital,
free software has demonstrated with community
development and intellectual capital.

11. References:
- http://www.vkbanen.nl/werkgevers/725364/Starter-wenst-afwisseling.html
- http://people.redhat.com/tiemann/STS-Forum-Tiemann-2006.pdf
- http://www.kennislink.nl/publicaties/professioneel-netwerk-maakt- muzikanten-s
Contact Information:
Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip@fedoraproject.org>