linux.conf.au: Peeping under the brim

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 21 January 2008 19:37

Opinion and Analysis

Attending the Australian national Linux conference just once - in 2007 - was enough for Eugene Teo to conclude that he would like to get involved in some capacity.
For starters, this year the Fedora ambassador for Singapore is organising the Fedora miniconf. Teo works as the technical account manager of Red Hat's Asia Pacific Global
Support Services.

At LCA 2007, Teo encountered the man himself - Linus Benedict Torvalds, an encounter which left him "absolutely excited."

"I had an opportunity to attend linux.conf.au last year for the very first time, and it was indeed one of the best Linux conferences I ever attended in Asia Pacific," he says. "It was also the first time I got to meet Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and many other open source superstars. I was absolutely excited. I made sure that I will return for the next linux.conf.au, and here I am."

Teo manages several financial services accounts in the Asia Pacific and Japan, where he has designed and implemented product support and software deployment strategies.

Fedora is Red Hat's community distribution and serves as an entry point for accepting code from several hundred developers, some of which goes on to be incorporated into Red Hat's business distributions.

Asked about the percentage of code which had been derived from the Fedora project for the business side, Teo said: "The Fedora project offers an opportunity to open source developers to create a vast pool of software with no legal emcumbrances. Fedora forms the base for several derivative Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the primary sponsor of the Fedora project, and we have several hundred active developers working and leading the project in coordination with the volunteer community members."

An active member of the Linux and open source community in Singapore for over a decade, Teo has held different posts in the country's LUG. He has spoken at numerous events including the Red Hat Summit 2007 in San Diego, and linux.conf.au 2007 in Sydney.