I’m a FLOSS and Linux user for more than 15 years now. I had never been in a community, even if sometimes I marginally contributed to some open source projects, mainly in translation or in bug reporting. There were various reasons: my chronic lack of free time, and the fear to be totally unuseful due to the fact that there is so many skilled people inside these projects.
My first Linux distribution was Red Hat Linux 6, back in 1999. Then Fedora Core, but in the subsequent years I was a so called distro hopper, at least on my laptops. Last year I decided to go back to the origins, and install Fedora again. I was surprised by the clean and ease installation process, compared to the past (and compared to other distros). Looking at the wiki and to other project’s sites, I felt like contributing to the Fedora Project was simple and newcomers were welcome. Then I subscribed to various mailing lists, looking to a place where my little skills could be useful.
The continuation of the story may appear totally unrelated to Fedora. In fact, in the meanwhile, at work I was involved in a project related to a captive portal for a wifi network, and I needed to send some SMS to foreign phone numbers in order to test the registration page. I’m not an international guy, and I have not friends outside my country (in reality yes, a former colleague that lives in Brazil, but it was unavailable at the time). So, in some messages coming from some Fedora mailing list, at the bottom of the emails of a very active contributor I saw a mobile number. I privately contacted him using Hangout, by telling him my needs. He was so kind that I thought that all the people of the Fedora community might be so collaborative and nice. And in fact I’m still impressed by the commitment of a lot of members in avoiding toxic behaviour and how important is to maintain an healthy community.
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue set to the milestone: Fedora Appreciation Week 2018
Hi, thank you for submitting a story for Fedora Appreciation Week 2018! We were happy to feature a number of stories on the Community Blog this year and you were a part of this effort.
You can find all 2018 Contributor Stories here.
Thanks again, and please consider sharing another story here for Appreciation Week 2019. :smile:
Metadata Update from @jflory7: - Issue close_status updated to: archived - Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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