John McLean Named Recipient of Second Annual Fedora Scholarship

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that John McLean is the recipient of the 2009 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its second year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. McLean was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to attend Duke University this fall and double major in computer science and religion.

Fedora and Red Hat are committed to helping future talent in the technology and computer science field gain hands-on experience with open source software. The Fedora Scholarship serves as a way to enable up-and-coming contributors to work within free and open source software communities throughout their college years and beyond. As a Fedora contributor, McLean has served as both a software developer and packager. He has made numerous contributions to Fedora and the open source community including his work with the Fedora Robotics Special Interest Group to develop a demonstration program for the robotics simulation and development software Player/Stage/Gazebo.

“We received an impressive response during our inaugural year and we are very pleased to be awarding the Fedora Scholarship once again this year,” said Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat. “With this scholarship, Fedora and Red Hat hope to continue to foster strong interest in free and open source software across the next generation of engineers. We thank John for his numerous contributions to the Fedora Project and look forward to his work with the Fedora community in the future.”

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 was first introduced to Linux a couple of years ago and at the time had limited experience and knowledge of the computing world in general,” said McLean.