The goal of Red Hat High is to use free software to introduce disadvantaged kids to technology they might not otherwise be able to afford, encouraging them to pursue further education and career opportunities. Red Hat High bundles free software alternatives to expensive proprietary applications on a Fedora live CD that campers can take with them to use on any computer. The program has been in “beta” for two years, according to Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat’s director of community development. “The first two years have been good,” he says. “Lots of happy kids and happy parents.” He calls it a successful trial, but one that must “scale up” in order to continue to be successful. “We’re not in the business of doing small things at Red Hat.”

Camp is in session for one week in July, on the campus of North Carolina State University. During the day, the 50 Red Hat High campers learn how to create audio and video files, design Web sites, and build 3-D animations using free software like Audacity and Blender. The evenings are reserved for field trips to bowling alleys and movies and other fun activities. DeKoenigsberg says, “We took them to the Digital Circus, a junior college level school for learning the same stuff they were learning at Red Hat High. One of the students at Digital Circus was showing them what he’s learned. ‘This is a wireframe,’ he said, and they said, ‘We learned all of that already.’ Then the professor comes in and says, ‘Let’s show you some stuff that you don’t know. Do any of you know what IK is?’ And they said, ‘Yes, that’s inverse kinematics.’” Free software gives the children the ability to learn the same techniques and skills that college-level students are learning, at a much lower cost, DeKoenigsberg says. Maya, the 3-D computer animation application that students at the Digital Circus use, can cost $7,000. Blender is free.

Now that DeKoenigsberg has two years of Red Hat High under his belt, he’s ready to take the program to the next level. “There’s some cost to holding a residential summer camp, and it doesn’t scale as well as we would like,” he says. Red Hat can provide all the financial backing necessary to translate the program into something that can serve the needs of more kids. “We would like to develop a strong affiliation with some entity that can house the kids,” DeKoenigsberg says. “We don’t run a residential summer camp as our core competency at Red Hat. But what we can do is gather a community of developers and users around open content for an important social purpose.”

DeKoenigsberg hopes that the education kids received at Red Hat High can be translated into something portable and scalable. “We putting together a deployable curriculum in a box, and making sure we have something that is turnkey.” The lessons have to be understandable and usable by the average junior high school teacher, so that more than just a handful of children each year benefit from the program. “If it’s only going to be 50 kids, it’s not worth doing,” DeKoenigsberg says. “It doesn’t make enough of an impact. The opportunity for free software to change the way kids learn is too big.” Along with the goal of making a teacher-friendly curriculum, DeKoenigsberg says it is important to get some real world feedback from actual teachers. “We are developing the curriculum in a wiki style, so that teachers can change it directly. After that, the next priority is internationalization.

DeKoenigsberg admits there are some real world challenges associated with providing kids with a free software alternative. One of those is the fact that just having a live CD is not enough for a student who doesn’t have access to a computer outside of school hours. And even for those who can use a computer at the library or elsewhere, saving files once they have been created can be a problem. At Red Hat High, each student had a scratch space on the network on which to save files. DeKoenigsberg says one of the possible future projects for the Red Hat High community is to bundle the files on a bootable, writable USB key. “The cost of that will become lower over time.”

As the senior community development manager, DeKoenigsberg is used to the idea of building a community around a cause. “People are deeply incented to spread the goodness of free software,” he says. “And the educational market is strategic to people who care about the advancement of free software. It’s strategic to the company for obvious reasons, and to the community for similar reasons.” He compares the philosophy behind Red Hat High to his company’s involvement with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “We have a very calculated social consciousness. OLPC is about getting that laptop into the hands of as many kids as possible. Red Hat High is about getting the understanding of what free software can do into the brains of as many kids as possible.”

“I wanted to see what tools were available for creating a Web application anybody could use to maintain a Web site and do online collaboration,” Guermeur says. He found that the classic LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl) was exactly what he needed to create a full-featured content management system.

Guermeur built an application that includes file management, Web page templates and themes, a discussion forum, calendaring, group and user controls, a task manager, and MySQL database tools. When he was done, he was impressed with what he’d done. “I said, ‘I’m pretty sure everybody needs what I’ve just created. Let’s put it up on the Internet.’ Within 30 days we were in the top 10 downloads on SourceForge.net. I quit my day job,” and launched a company, Metadot, to support his creation, dubbed Metadot Portal Server, or just Metadot.

Guermeur says his company’s main income stream comes from the technical support it provides for some of the larger companies and entities using Metadot. “We have 10,000 downloads every month. Out of these, anywhere between one and 10 will buy something.” He says the US Navy buys a lot of tech support, but the universities and colleges on his user list usually have plenty of experienced admins on campus, “and they don’t need us at all.” Guermeur doesn’t mind. He says doesn’t want his company to get too big because he likes what he calls the “open source lifestyle.”

“We are trying to stay small,” he says. Metadot employs 10 people including Guermeur. “The benefit is that you control the destiny of your software. You can be very agile and address your user base needs very quickly. When you are a big company, you become part of a big system that will evolve on the market demands. It’s a bigger machine.”

Part of Metadot’s agility is the community surrounding its development. “The main advantage [of having access to the community] is that the marketing is free [because of word-of-mouth advertising]. Also, we get lots of feedback and help,” Guermeur says. “They say, ‘Hey, you have a bug and here’s a way to fix it. Sometimes they fix it for us.” Even so, Guermeur cannot rely completely on an itch-scratching community. “They’re working for free, so they don’t work on our schedule, they work on their schedule. The more we have of these people the better, but there is still some overheard because we need to keep the software available and we need to make sure that when there is a new version it works for everyone. There is a cost there.”

Guermeur says he uses open source throughout the company. “We run Ubuntu on workstations and Red Hat on the servers.” He and his development team use the Eclipse development environment, as well as Ruby on Rails, the MySQL database, and “sometimes Java.” Since Metadot runs on Windows and Mac OS X, they keep a few workstations around with those operating systems loaded. “But most of us use Linux,” he says.

Even though Guermeur is content to keep Metadot small, he still keeps expanding the product line, which now includes a hosted help desk application called Mojo, and his latest offering, Montastic, a free Web-based server monitoring application. He says the key to his success has been his enthusiasm for providing great technology to his customers. “You start a business because you have a passion for your product and you want to share it with your user base. It’s peer relations. If you have an idea of making a million dollars, you may want to look at another business model.”