It’s… been a long time.
I signed up way too late to get my old IRC handle mkj here. And I’m no longer so young as to want to use michaelkjohnson though you might recognize that from email if you’ve been around for a long time. I was a relatively early Red Hatter and did plenty of early work on Red Hat Linux. One of my first big projects was adding PAM across the distribution, which involved finishing the implementation enough to use and then “pamifying” everything that did authentication.
When Red Hat decided to stop work on Red Hat Linux and build only Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I articulated the value to Red Hat of a true community-driven distribution, without which RHEL would wither, but with which Red Hat would build relevance for RHEL and Red Hat more generally, and which could enable a much larger and more active community than RHL had ever done. One which would enable development leadership outside of Red Hat. One in which decisions didn’t need to be driven by Red Hat. One which could move faster than RHL had ever done, and dare new things; separating the senses of “stable” — allowing Red Hat to focus on the “minimizing change” connotation for RHEL, but retaining Red Hat’s expectations for the “not breaking” connotation for high quality. One that could evolve in ways I didn’t know yet.
I had what is now @mattdm 's job for Fedora Core 1.
But I burned out getting Fedora started, and left Red Hat. I then tried something new with ewt and msw. rPath, the company we started together, didn’t survive, but I think some of the ideas we came up with influenced packaging expectations and I’m still proud of the technology we built there. I learned a lot.
I showed up at I think a FUDcon years ago in RH’s Centennial Campus office (I don’t even remember what year that was), and someone took a picture of past-and-present FPLs. I don’t recall that I ever got a copy of the picture, though it’s probably somewhere on the internet. And of course, now there can never be another one. 
I’ve been lurking for a long time. I’m likely to keep lurking mostly. But I’m still proud of the work I did, and it’s not clear to me that anything like Fedora would have happened without me.
I still run Fedora as my daily driver, both at home and at work. And I’m still grateful that Fedora is, and that it is what it is: A community.
So, Hi! 
