Business Wire
6.2.11
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110602005157/en/Fedora-Project-Recognizes-Student-Contributor-Fedora-Scholarship

The Fedora Project Recognizes Student Contributor with Fedora Scholarship

Ricky Elrod Named Fourth Annual Scholarship Recipient for Work Within Free and Open Source Software

RALEIGH, N.C.--The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that Ricky Elrod is the recipient of the 2011 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its fourth year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. Elrod has spent significant time working within Fedora’s Infrastructure Team, a group of volunteers that manage the servers and applications that run Fedora. He was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to continue his education at the University of Akron this fall and major in Computer Science.

Fedora is built by a worldwide community of people and is inclusive for anyone to join and contribute across multiple functions from content writers, designers and marketers to translators, web developers and system administrators. Fedora and Red Hat are committed to fostering the talent of young contributors and aim to encourage students to gain hands-on experience with open source software and lead in the creation and spread of free code and content.

"We are very pleased to be awarding the Fedora Scholarship to Ricky this year," said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. "His contributions to the Fedora Infrastructure Team have made a positive impact to help everything from our project website and wiki to the package builder and update manager run smoothly. We thank Ricky for his numerous contributions and look forward to his continued work with Fedora as he attends university and pursues his degree.”

Fedora Scholarship applicants are evaluated on criteria including the quality of contributions made to Fedora and other free software projects, references provided by Fedora community members, the amount of time the applicant has been contributing to Fedora and the overall quality of the application. Recipients are awarded a scholarship to be applied toward tuition for the student's college or university education. Fedora Scholarship winners also receive funding for travel and lodging at the Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) nearest to their location for each year of the scholarship.

“I would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to the Fedora Infrastructure team and the Fedora Project as a whole, for showing me, and many people like me, that open source software is easy to contribute to from any level of experience,” said Elrod. “Thank you to all who make Fedora the great project that it is, and the great project that it will continue to be.”

The 2012 application window will open in fall 2011. For more information, visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scholarship.

For more information on the Fedora Project, please visit http://fedoraproject.org/. For more information on Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.