jmbuser

What I like about being involved in the Fedora Project, after many years of being a consumer of free and open software, is the opportunity to give something back to the community, to be, in a small way, a producer.

My profession for a very long time has been as an ICT Consultant. I've been paid to produce and maintain applications for clients, manage complex projects, and educate people in the use of technology.

Information and communications technology, or ICT, has undergone incredible changes in over the past few decades.

Computers are no longer confined to glass rooms in large enterprises, and communications has never been the same since the Internet and, especially, the World Wide Web.

Access to computers 25 years ago was a rare privilege; today, it is almost commonplace. I remember working on applications by coding on paper, and changing a few lines of code via batch update. Now, I can download entire Linux distributions and open source applications, read the code and modify it as I wish, with few restrictions. Now I can actually own a computer, the hardware and the software.

Access to information was mainly through printed manuals and books, purchased at great price. Now, I can use an internet search engine, locate volumes of information of varying quality, and even create and modify information myself. I can do this from just about anywhere on a variety of devices, ranging from SMS texts to sophisticiated multimedia presentations.

What is even more amazing is that, while ICT is definitely a noble profession, with its own expert subject matter, terminology and disciplined approaches, ICT is also a passion, not just for professional practitioners like me, but for people like my son, who most likely will pursue another line of work.

My hope for the future is that ICT continues to be transformed into a source of positive change for society, rather than merely a sophisticated way of taxing people for processing data and communicating, accessible only to the affluent and privileged few.

One of the best ways to do this is to provide people with the tools for change for the good. The Fedora Project, along with other FOSS communities, does this well. With these freely available tools, people can be producers as well as consumers.