FOSE ’10 FTW.

Thanks to our Fedora Ambassadors for a special assist last week. We were asked to support Tux.org, a nonprofit umbrella group in the Washington DC area, and the Northern Virginia LUG (NoVaLUG) in their presence at FOSE, the USA’s biggest federal government IT show. Our Ambassadors came through with flying colors — David Nalley sent out a box of discs since Fedora is incredibly popular in federal government offices.

Although I wasn’t able to attend this year because of a prior scheduled travel, I received some very nice correspondence back from the folks at Tux.org about our assistance there. In addition, a friend from my local FredLUG was on hand to help at the booth, and he arranged to have copies of our handy one-page release notes PDF printed out for people as a helpful pamphlet. He mentioned:

The Fedora CDs were a big hit at FOSE. We “sold out” early Thursday on the last day. I had printed the flier you pointed me to in “book format” so it folded up, had the 3 pages easily read. That turned out to be very helpful for several people interested.

He also added a point of interest:

One of the most often asked question [sic] was the difference between the distributions. Since I had one blank page left, it would be nice if the last page would highlight the “why fedora” answer.

I would argue that in the case of the Fedora operating system, there’s a particular combination of freedom, innovation, beauty, and relevance that make it unique. Certainly other Linux distros communities feature one or more of these qualities, but it’s the combination of all of them that makes Fedora such a pleasant distro to use.

There’s a page on our wiki that addresses some of these ideas in greater detail. If you’re looking for a way to help out, maybe you’re interested in using the sources provided and building a new single page that makes those ideas as easy and fun to learn about as the rest of the one page release notes.