To the victor go the spoils.

Now it’s finally official: a Fedora Scholarship. A while back, we started talking about ways to identify and cultivate young contributors to Fedora. We are starting to see more and more young people taking the opportunity to be full participants in the open source world. As part of our mission to develop a culture of contribution in FOSS and not just consumption, we want to identify and reward those individuals.

One way we can do this is through the incentive of scholarship funds. This year we started the Fedora Scholarship to lead that effort. The inaugural winner, Ricky Zhou, is someone that many people may know from his exceptional work on our websites and infrastructure. Ricky came seemingly out of nowhere, overnight, and impressed everyone on the team immediately with his energy, enthusiasm, positive attitude, skill, and teamwork. I can’t think of a better person to exemplify the Fedora ideals.

Ricky is starting at Carnegie Mellon University this week, and we’re very proud of him. He starts as a freshman with a great track record of FOSS contribution already under his belt, and we know he’s going to delight and impress his peers and professors alike. Best of luck, Ricky!