Sandro Mathys reports on his blog that he was selected as the 2010 RHCE of the Year for Europe. I’m not surprised to see another active Fedora contributor selected for this honor, like John Rose in 2009 for North America and Jeroen van Meeuwen for Europe and Michael Yingbull for Canada in 2008.
RHCEs take a challenging, practical test to ensure they have a high degree of capability and performance. If you want to do well on that test (or any other for that matter), you practice. RHCEs know as they practice their skills on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, they can develop new skills in emerging technologies on Fedora for use now and in the future. I suspect a lot of RHCEs use RHEL at work and Fedora on their desktop or at home in part for that reason. But more than just developing skills, the Fedora community allows anyone — not just an RHCE — to work with some of the brightest people in free and open source software, and contribute to what they use.
Our community Infrastructure team, for example, has quite a number of RHCE-certified people involved as you might expect. This team that puts exceptional IT service management principles to work every day, providing services for the Fedora community. They also develop frameworks and applications we use, and moreover, they provide them as 100% free and open source software. Anyone can not only use that software, but modify it for their own use and redistribute it as well. There are may other areas in Fedora in which we have RHCEs scattered throughout teams as well.
In each case of the previous RHCE winners from Fedora, someone who’s discovered the value of Fedora has also stepped up to bring some knowledge and skill back into the community. Sandro, for instance, a long-time Fedora Ambassador, is heading up the team that will bring the Fedora Users and Developers Conference to Zurich this fall. I’m proud to add Sandro to this growing list of honored community members. Congratulations, sir!