Please welcome our guest today, Clint Savage, Founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation, and Fedora Ambassador. He is also a Linux Instructor by way of profession. Having met him in person and finding him a neat and interesting person, it seemed appropriate to find out more about him. I contacted him via email and asked a few questions, to which he was kind enough to respond. Here is who he is and a few of his thoughts regarding Linux and open source.

What draws you to the philosophy of Open Source Software?

For me its about the community as a whole. I’ve never met so many smart people in my life willing to share their knowledge with others. In the business world there seems to be this philosopy of ’someone will steal everything I know if I share’. While I can understand this attitude for some situations, I can’t justify that overall. The community and businesses around open source do not seem to be this way. In fact, the changing mentality of many of the businesses starting to embrace open source is the reason I love this area.

I’m also a big fan of the release early, release often concept in the open source development structure. I find myself willing to give away code to others so they may learn how I did something, and vice versa. To me, its about sharing and growing together as a community, improving it as a whole. Nobody should be left behind if they’d like to learn.

What was the Linux distribution you started with? When did you first start using Linux?

I started with Red Hat 4.2, and quickly moved to 5.1. This was about 1997/1998.

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