Matthew Miller is now on the Internet!

A Curated Presentation of Identity via Selected Links

Work: Fedora Project Leader and Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat

Fedora Stuff: Fedora Discussion, posts on Fedora Magazine, posts on the Fedora Community Blog, slides and video from talks

Previous Work: Harvard SEAS, Boston University Linux, the tiny ISP a friend and I built and ran from 1995–1998

More: IceBreaker (an action/puzzle game I wrote in the year 2000), Photography Q&A, and other random hacking

Crucial early Internet communities: LUGNET and rec.toys.lego, Poster Children "pkids" list. (See Rose's book, Play Like a Man: My Life in Poster Children!)

Social Media

• Mastodon at https://hachyderm.io/@mattdm. I may wander around a few different servers as things evolve, but for now this is "home".
• I am also mattdm on Keybase, and mattdm on GitHub, and mattdm on GitLab, and many other places too.
• Sadly, I'm mattdm_fedora on Reddit. Plain "mattdm" was taken (by someone who is definitely not me).
• I am the Matthew Miller (or, at least, matthewmiller) on LinkedIn, but mostly I just occasionally log in to click "accept" for any invites from people who look like they aren't recruiters, and to disconnect any recruiters that snuck through previously.
• @mattdm on Twitter — that's the real me, but I'm not active there anymore.
• Likewise, I'm (still) on Facebook but I rarely use that... mostly for occasional local neighborhood group stuff. If you don't know me personally, that's not going to be interesting.

Why Open Source / Free Software?

These days, Linux operating systems and software are very slick, but it’s fair to say that they’re not always as full-featured or polished as proprietary alternatives. So, why bother? It’s not that difficulty is a virtue… in fact, we try to make it easy for everyone. The important thing is: this software belongs to us — and that includes you, no matter who you are.

You can be a Windows or Mac OS or Photoshop user, you can be a power-user, you can be a super-fan, but these can never really be yours. Even when you pay for them, you don’t really own them. Even if you work for Microsoft, Apple, or Adobe… you’re being paid to build something that belongs to the company. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s also not very exciting.

Free and open source software is different. It’s licensed so that we all have the fundamental freedoms to use, learn from, and share these tools forever. This bring us together in a community that we are all together a part of — coders, testers, writers, designers, artists, organizers, and other contributors, but also users.

There are no restrictions: you can be a part of this too. If you’re using Fedora Linux or Firefox or Krita or LibreOffice, you already are! If not, you’re welcome to join, no matter your background, age, experience, ability, race or ethnicity, body type, gender identity or expression, or anything else. We’d love to have you — your participation will make our world of shared software objectively better for everyone.

Plus, you know, you are an awesome human being.

About “Matthew Miller”

I prefer “Matthew” to “Matt” even though my handle is `mattdm` pretty much everywhere. The short story is that when I picked my username for my first VAX/VMS account on cedar.goshen.edu, my options were `mattdm` or `matthedm` and the latter seemed like extra typing. And it's TOO LATE to change now!

“Matthew Miller” is a rather common name. For example, almost none of these people are me. If you need to verify my identity in fancy cyber way, this is my GPG key.

My pronouns are he/him/his.

If you have any doubts as to my verified identity, please observe this blue check: ✓

If you would like to attempt to contact me

You could send me email. I try to keep up. Mastodon or Matrix might be better.

Please note that I'm not really the best person for your Fedora tech support requests — I don't know everything, and there is only one of me. Please try Ask Fedora or Fedora Discussion.