Open source opens doors at Red Hat

As a Fedora community architect, Justin W. Flory ’20 (networking and systems administration) wears many hats.

He is a community liaison, accountant, and project manager—all rolled into one. Most of all, he’s a leader at Red Hat working on the strategic direction of the Fedora Project, a cornerstone of the Linux open source movement.

Open work is non-proprietary—meaning it’s licensed in a way that is publicly accessible and anyone can modify and share it. The original term for open source came out of the software industry.

“Open source is a set of rules and guidelines about protecting freedoms, but it’s also a movement of people—that’s what has always attracted me to it,” said Flory, who is based out of Atlanta.

Flory fell in love with open source in high school, when he used it to play and run a Minecraft game server. After he learned that RIT offers the first-ever minor in free and open source software and free culture, he applied to the university early decision. He also arrived at school a week early in order to attend Flock to Fedora, a global open source event that was coincidentally being held in Rochester that year.

At RIT, Flory learned how to use the technological and social sides of open source to share and analyze data and improve collaboration among global, decentralized teams. He also volunteered with Red Hat, and through an RIT initiative, he earned a co-op with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), where he helped grow a community around a mapping project that visualizes schools around the world and their connectivity to the internet.

Now, Flory has joined Red Hat and the Fedora Project, which produces the popular open source Fedora Linux operating system. It’s used by millions—from small nonprofits to Meta.

Flory collaborates on projects that make it easier to develop artificial intelligence solutions on a Linux platform and RISC-V hardware architecture for developing open source microprocessors.

He is also promoting outreach to engage more open source creators from underrepresented places. Four people have now taken on the role of Fedora community architect and three of them have been RIT alumni. The newest intern is also a current RIT student.

Most recently, Flory ran the annual Flock to Fedora conference and he brought it back to Rochester for 2024. Nearly 120 contributors came together from 14 countries to exchange ideas and improve society.

“If you told me nine years ago that I’d be making a career out of organizing Flock and these projects, I wouldn’t have believed you. RIT helped open the door for me to this incredible community.”