Devin Carraway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Background: I started with Linux in 1993, in college. I came into it from a background in the WWIV BBS community, which included a largish group of people exchanging modifications to the BBS source; without benefit of the Internet or exposure the free software movement, that group had discovered in vague terms the benefits of open source -- most significantly the ability to tear software open, make changes, and pass those modifications on for others' benefit. That community died out with the popularization of the Internet (and its remnants have never gotten out of the proprietary rut the software was stuck in). I gradually transitioned myself towards Linux while working on my CS degree. Since then I've conducted essentially all of my career using free software, as a sysadmin, web and embedded software engineer. I'm enthusiastic about the use of OSS as a fundamentally correct way of doing things with computers. It's also one of the main reasons I like my work so much -- it enables working with software to be a process of understanding rather than just doing."
Devin currently maintains acme, quelcom and sawfish-themes. David Weinehall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Well, I've been maintainer of the 2.0-kernel of Linux for quite some time, I'm an old C64 programmer, but since several year I'lve been programming on Linux. I began using Linux and Free Software because I grew tired of buggy software and the fact that did not have full control over my system. The reason I want to volunteer time is to give something back. I feel that I have something to give." David has a really funny web page at http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ Paul Cupis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Paul currently maintains cdbakeoven, doctorj and guarddog. Brian Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "I have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, but I find computer science far more interesting :) . I programmed professionally throughout college and for a couple years after I graduated. I programmed mostly in C++, especially with the Qt toolkit, but also have experience with C, Perl, Java, Fortran, and others. Now, I'm looking toward pursuing a graduate degree in computer science. I was first introduced to Linux back in 1995 by my college roommate. The merits of free software were obvious to me even back then, when Linux was far more raw than it is now. Since then, I've always had Linux installed on one machine or another and have been through the whole gamut of distributions, including Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, and Corel, before finally turning to Debian in early 2001. I've decided to volunteer my time to Debian for several reasons. First of all, I love the Debian community; there are some amazing and brilliant people involved in the Debian project. Through the community, I've learned far more in the past 2 years than I did in my previous five years of Linux usage. Second, I enjoy the openness and democratic nature of the project. I find it very satisfying that anything I contribute, whether through package maintainance or by simply voicing my opinions and views on the mailing lists, can have a direct impact on the project. Finally, after using free software for several years, I enjoy giving back to the free software community. I have an assortment of interests regarding the Debian project. Most of my work thusfar with Debian has been in package development. However, I've also contributed documentation to Osamu's "Debian Reference" guide. Furthermore, I've done some QA work by sending patches to the BTS. Finally, I regularly offer support to Debian users on the mailing lists. In the future, I plan to continue these activities, and would also like to explore some other areas of the project. For example, I've been keeping an eye on debian-installer development, and I'm hoping to find some time in the near future to do some hacking on it." Brian currently maintains: aspell-en, libclass-singleton-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libtext-aspell-perl, pornview, qtella, scoop. Giuseppe Sacco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "As you might imaging I am an italian, and I like it, but I like to know how different peoples think. That's why I went to a far university and the I worked for a foreign company. I went to many countries in europe and (once) in central america. And now i stay in Italy. That's way now I have time to spend on Debian. I used to "only" coordinating the italian translation because I did not had enough time. But now I think should be possible. Free Software has always been something I trusted: when I was at the university I founded a meeting of Amiga developers. This meeting was for exchanging informations and free software. More than free software I trust free information, that's why I started on w.d.o. If I recall correclt Free Information is one of the social contract points. For the very same reason I write articles for www.diff.org, an italian webzine for DIFFerent software." Robert Millan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "I'm a young computer-science student who has been interested on GNU/Linux systems for quite some time. I initially came to free software because it was technically superior to the platform I normally used (windows); when i had some experience with it I found the importance of it being 'free', and became compromised with the free software movement. Then I found the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, i were told that it was hold by a volunteering effort and that their objectives were freedom and quality, rather than benefits and market share. I found it to my liking that a group or people could be generously spending lots of time and effort to produce a good for the computer user, so I decided to help with my spare time." Robert currently maintaints bochs, plex86, plex86-doc, tubesock and vgabios. Mats Rynge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "About me: I'm 25 years old and I am originally from Sweden. For about five years ago I moved to Los Angeles with my girlfriend and went back to school. At the moment I'm attending my last quarter as a CS undergrad at UCLA. I also work part time for School of Engineering porting free software to AIX (http://aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu). Our packages are simple tar.gz's, and we do not have to worry about the base system, but the porting part is more challenging. I basically see it as a good experinece for becoming a Debian developer. I'm an officer of the UCLA LUG (http://linux.ucla.edu), in which I am of course trying to convert everybody to Debian. :) Just in our lounge we have about 10 servers/users x86 boxes, one G4, and one SparcStation running Debian. The next project is an SGI box that was donated by the CS department... I was introduced to Linux around 1995 (IIRC...). I went to a small computer convention and saw Linux running X and the app that really impressed me was xdaliclock (the one that "melts"). I bought a book that included a Slackware CD. I got really hooked and it went from there to Red Hat and then Debian 1.3. I also started the linuxprogramming.com website, which I ran for a couple of years. It was then aquired by Internet.com, and they shut it down for about a year ago. So, I do feel that it is time to give something back to Debian and the Debian community. As you can tell, I already give up a lot of time to Linux and open source/free software, and the basic reason behind it is of course that I really like the mentality of open source." Stefan Schimanski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "With my knowledge of KDE I try help in packaging KDE3 for Debian currently which unfortunately is not in Sid yet. Moreover I frequently package applications I need for my own work. I would love to not only do this for my own, but contribute my work to the project. For instance I did the proofgeneral package which is already in Sid, sponsored by Ralf Treinen. I am working on the whole Isabelle tool chain (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/Isabelle/, a popular theorem prover) currently to get it integrated into Debian." Takeshi YAEGASHI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Takeshi is interested in embedded systems and wants to port Debian to the SuperH (SH) architecture. He has already maintained his own Debian distribution for SH for the last 6 months at http://debian.dodes.org/. Takeshi has also ported eCos to the Playstation and is involved with Linux on the Playstation. He's generally interested in Linux on Linux on embedded systems, "I've tried many Linux ports almost just for fun at my leisure. And I love GNU/Linux and the free programming environment. It would be great if I could use GNU/Linux on my handheld devices and game consoles rather than pre-installed software." Martin A. Godisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Well, I'm a 24 year old student of computer science at Dresden University of Technology. My first computer I bought in 1991, and mainly used it for programming Turbo Pascal. I came to Linux in 1997 when I began my studies, and the first distribution I tried was SuSE. A little later I also tried Debian Bo, RedHat, and Slackware. I continued then using SuSE until the release of Slink and then I changed to Debian. I also had some competent Debian mentors at university, e.g. the admin of ftp.de.debian.org. Today I'm using Debian at home and at work and I'm responsible for several servers at university and some workstations and notebooks, all running Debian. Besides administration my main interest is IT security, that includes things like cryptography, anonymity/pseudonymity, firewalls, intrusion detection. I would like to extract some of my ideas concerning security in order to make Debian a little more secure by default. In my free time I often do programming, mostly helpers for administrative tasks. Sometimes a piece of software can be extracted which may be usefull for others as well, so I found out that it's a nice feeling to know that other people use software written by oneself. I enjoy receiving feature requests from the end of the world and to fullfill them, maybe making someone happy..." Oliver Kurth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "I am author of 'masqmail', which is an MTA designed for hosts without permanent internet conection (eg. hosts/small LANs at home, notebooks, possibly PDAs). I maintain the debian package of it, it was previously maintained by Gregor Hoffleit ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), but he orphaned it. I would also maintain other packages, and I am already looking for interesting packages. Since I have experience in creating installation CDs, I may also help with the debian-installer or pgi." Oliver currently maintains five packages: masqmail, ifplugd, dumpasn1, tcpreen and memtester. He has a few other packages in his non-official repository. Emmanuel le Chevoir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Emmanuel currently maintains fluxconf and xsmbrowser. Mark J Ray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> MJ Ray is involved in the Association For Free Software http://www.affs.org.uk/ "While sysadminning Debian systems, I backported packages from unstable and testing to run on stable and locally packaged other software. I've tried to help in reporting and fixing bugs in Debian packages. It's actually one of those bugfixes that has finally made me bow to Thom [May]'s pressure and apply for NM: wily, a package I use every session, has been orphaned and then booted out of debian with a long list of silly bugs." Guillem Jover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "I'm interested in: maintaining packages qa work porting packages to the Hurd, BSDs, m68k, PowerPC, mips (for PSX2) using debain on clusters (beowulf) debian-installer get debconf on all install-time interactive packages i18n somehow My first contact with computers was with a MSX Hit-Bit 55P, only to play. Then the first IBM PC appeared in my home in 1992, used m$dos for some years, dual booting it with Win9x, and later with WinNT. In 1996 wanted to learn to program and my first try was Qbasic (only with the m$dos help system), two days reading and gave up (was so horrible ;), then I got a book about Turbo Pascal. I was very interested in the system internals, so learned Assembler. Found Ralf Brown Interrupt List, and went down and down on m$dos. More low level docs came to feed my mind. I needed a powerful low-level language, so C was next, also C++. Discovered DJGPP and the beauties of free software. Discovered Linux and bought a book about SVR4, obtained a Slackware 3.1 and started trying it from a boot disk. Also learned by reading alot of free softwre src code, specially the linux kernel src. In 1997 learned Shell script, and Awk. Got Internet access and built an intranet in my home, my interest in networking grew more than the simple multigame IPX/SPX experiences over serial links in m$dos days. In 1998 switched to Debian Hamm, until now, using Woody, Sarge and Sid. 3D got my interest, and started thinking about a 3D artificial life simulator. Also an excuse to implement and reuse a 3D engine for a pet OS I had in mind. My cluster needs expaned as I envisioned that the simulator would be a very high processor consumer, and started accumulating old Pentium boxes (currently 24, including a dual Pentium). In 1999 learned tcl/tk and javascript, but as I have not used them much, I'm not good at those. In 2000 I got curious about Lisp, so took some books from the library. Also near the end of the year I _delurked_ in a newsgroup, and started contributing back to the comunity at first throught the news, then subscribed to some debian mailing lists, and started posting. In 2001 as part of two classes I had to learn SML and Prolog. Completed my switch to Debian. Subcribed to alot of Debian mailing lists, and decided finally to take some steps to became a DD (if accepted), taking advantage of a cheap travel to Madrid (as in Barcelona there are no DDs) to meet with Amaya to get my gpg key signed. Since then I have been learning the Debian internals, habits, sending patches to the bts, and preparing to be a DD. 2002 reached, installed the Hurd and ported some applications, I hope to have time and install also some of the BSD familiy to help the porting efforts, also to put my hands on my father's PowerPC. I have always felt that software should be free (really all things, but maybe that is too much uthopic :). When I discovered free software, it was like a light at the end of a tunnel, since then I'm a strong supporter, and try to use only free software, develop and help improve it, believing that this can bring us a better world." Thanks to James Troup for approving those people and to the AMs/NMs for writing the summaries. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
