This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 22 Feb 2004 4 applicants became maintainers.
Marc Brockschmidt <he> I'm 17 and live in Bochum, Germany. I go to school and will (hopefully) finish it with my Abitur in ~9 month. I also study computer science at the Fernuniversitaet Hagen (For the non-germans: A university to study without going to lectures. You get some text, have to send more or less normal exercises back and at the end of the semester you have to do an exam in a university nearby. It is considered to be as good as a normal university). After a year of civil service I'll study computer science at a normal university. I'm also interested in history and social sciences. I want to improve Debian, which is adopting and actively maintaining packages, helping with patches wherever i can. I started with Linux only 1 and 1/2 ago, before that i mainly was the windows gaming type of computer user, though i had learned a lot about programming. Both my parents do "computer stuff" for living, so it is normal for me to talk about soft- and hardware at home. My mother introduced me to SuSe Linux 4 or 5 years ago, but after some playing on the shell i removed it from my disk. Then, ~2 years ago, more and more people told me about debian and its advantages, so i decided to try it out. The first try failed, my motherboard decided to go to hell that day. After 2 or 3 month i installed debian on my main box... Getting the X-Server to work was hard, but using my ISDN hardware was impossible (no drivers :-/). I bought new hardware that week and after that most things worked perfectly. Since that moment i really love debian. I've learned a lot about debian through reading the IRC support channels. I really like the debian community and want to give something back to be part of this work. Mark is active in the debian-perl community and maintains dh-make-perl, firehol, libcurses-ui-perl, libend-perl, libextutils-depends-perl, libextutils-pkgconfig-perl, libfile-scan-perl, libglib-perl, libgnome2-canvas-perl, libgnome2-gconf-perl, libgnome2-perl, libgnome2-print-perl, libgnome2-vfs-perl, libgnome2-wnck-perl, libgtk2-gladexml-perl, libgtk2-perl, libgtk2-spell-perl, libhtml-table-perl, libintl-perl, libmail-verify-perl, libnet-cidr-perl, libnet-perl, libnews-nntpclient-perl, libperlmenu-perl, psh, wmclockmon, wmdiskmon, wmfrog, wmpinboard. He is also the co-maintainer for dpkg-sig, libconfigreader-perl, libmail-bulkmail-perl, libmodule-packaged-perl, libnet-domain-tld-perl. John V. Belmonte <jbelmonte> I started programming at about age 12, when home computers first emerged. At the time there were no mentors for this hobby, and classmates would tease you if they discovered you owned a computer. At age 16 I was addicted to the first text chat systems, still before the internet, where someone would stick 8 modems in a computer and attach 8 phone lines, and have everyone dial into that computer to chat. Not until over a decade later would I start using "Linux", because it was the platform required for Playstation2 game development. A friend and coworker suggested Debian. He also helped enlighten me about free software, and it wasn't long before I became a contributing member of the community. For Debian, on top of the bug reporting I already do, I am intending to maintain packages. As far as new packages, I'm not very eager about packaging the latest apps that emerge. Libraries and tools that other packages will build upon in the future seem more important. I plan to do NMU's and comaintain packages where my experience matches the need. I'd like to see having multiple maintainers per package become more common in the future. I have been using Debian daily since the Slink version. I don't mind volunteering my time because I've already benefited significantly from the work of others, and because the Social Contract ensures that others can benefit from the work I do. John maintains xmlsec1. Adam Kessel <ajkessel> I'm a third-year law student at Northeastern University School of Law and a free software zealot. As a developer, I intend to maintain several perl libraries that have yet to enter Debian, and also several small perl and python packages I've written myself. I'm also very interested in the politics and decisionmaking processes of Debian, and hope my legal skills might eventually be useful to the project. As a lawyer, I'd like to work in areas involving electronic civil liberties and/or free software, and I think my connection to the Debian community could be an important part of that work. Adam maintains libwww-shorten-perl, and shorlfilter. Frank Küster <frank> I was born in W?rzburg, Germany on March 31, 1971. I finished secondary school in 1990 and studied Chemistry, with a focus on Biochemistry, in W?rzburg and Regensburg. In 2002, I got my Ph.D. from Postdam University, all in Germany. Right now I am working in the department of Biophysical Chemistry at Basel University, Switzerland. I'm married, there's no children so far. I first used Debian as a file and print server for our workgroup during my Ph.D. thesis, and later also for my laptop and my wife's desktop machine. I use LaTeX a lot, for work and privately, and also have written a LaTeX class and some packages and published them on CTAN. In these years, I have come to appreciate the values of free software: Stability and documentation, lively development and simple interaction with developers, and its freeness. In fact using Debian only made me sensible for questions like "am I allowed to use this software?" While being a user, I started contributing to Debian by filing bug reports. Later, I prepared an enhanced private package of netenv, whose sponsored maintainer I am currently, and started to help the maintainers of the tetex packages by contributing on their mailing list. Frank maintains netenv. Thanks (as usual) to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
