This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 09 Jan 2005. 8 applicants became maintainers.
Christoph Haas <haas> "I'm a 30 year old computer scientist who has been a Linux addict for 14 years. After I got told of Debian I switched to Debian in 2002 and never looked back. I'm currently maintaining two Debian packages: 'ethstatus' is already in the distribution. 'cream' is ready to be uploaded. More packages are already in the queue. Besides doing usual tasks (user support on IRC and mailing lists, doing translations, complaining about bugs and writing tutorials for http://workaround.org) I started a larger project with Ivo Marino and Christoph Siess: "mentors.debian.net". I sponsored the hardware and negotiated the sponsored internet connection at a local ISP to run a public Debian package repository. Our intention was to improve the package quality from new maintainers and make them familiar with the upload process. I created an import system similar to mini-dinstall in Perl that is compatible with dput and dupload. New maintainers use this storage to make their packages publicly available so that potential sponsors can have a look at it. This service has been available for eight months now and we already have 155 developers registered. We presented our service in a speech at the LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe/Germany." John Lightsey <lightsey> "I began using and administering computers running free software after I left the Army in early 2000. Initially I used Mandrake and RedHat, but after a few months I began to worry that Mandrake didn't care enough about quality, and RedHat was too concerned with making money. Debian really appealed to me be because of it's non-commercial nature and strong commitment to reliable software over flashy new version numbers. Building a distro around KDE 3.x-beta1 may look great on a box cover, but it's a nightmare to work with. Around March of 2003 I decided to start contributing back to Debian by fixing RC bugs. Within the last few months I've also started to adopt orphaned packages that I use regularly. More than anything else I'd like to help Debian live up the goal of "high-quality" free software referenced in the Social Contract. In my opinion, bug hunting and giving software you love plenty of TLC is the way to build a high-quality distro." David Parker <dap> "At age 5 I taught myself to program on an Apple II GS and since then have been exploring the art of computing. About five or six years ago I got my hands on a magazine distributed with a (now) primitive version of Slackware and worked up the courage to try it out. In those in between years, I had become a Windows guru and as I learned more, I saw more and more fundamental flaws in Windows as a computing platform. Aside from the obvious benefits of a "free as in speech" system, Debian's "we won't hide problems" mantra appealed strongly to me, since as a programmer I knew better than to blindly accept badly written software. After a few years of using Linux on and off, toying with the various distributions, I finally decided to use Linux full time and at that point I felt I had enough experience to choose Debian as my distribution. Since then I have implemented Debian in a number of different environments (school computer labs, specialized applications, Linux servers for clients, etc) and have converted 5 other friends to Debian exclusively (also exposing handfuls of others to Debian and Linux in general). Also if you're bored and want a less techie intro about me, it's at <http://dap.webhop.net/me.php>" Gustavo Franco <stratus> Gustavo maintains a number of packages, including directoryassistant, kerneltop, libcrypt-cbc-perl, libcrypt-rijndael-perl, libfortune-perl, libgeo-ipfree-perl, notebook, and prokyon3. Isaac Clerencia <isaac> "I study in the University of Zaragoza, I'm in the last year (5) of Computer Science, I'm 22 years old. I'm working eventually, at this moment, I administer a network with some Debian workstations and I'm being a teacher in a "Network services with Debian" course ... I have just started my ¿"end of degree"? project, I'm working with SystemImager to set up an automatic installation server with several Debian images in the government of my region." Thomas Wana <greuff> "I'm a 22 years old student of computer sciences at the FH Wr. Neustadt in Austria (that's kind of a bachelor's degree university). Before that I finished a 5 years technical college for computer sciences and business administration (HTL for the ones who know that *g*), so I have been in business for 8 years already :-) [...] Technically I am a programmer, and I am especially interested in security stuff, auditing source code, writing exploits and so on, so I hope I can do something useful for the Debian Security Team. Martin Michlmayr said they need people. I am a member of the security group void.at, we are working on security tools and writing exploits for security holes as we find them or hear of them (and we post them all to bugtraq - really *g*) I also want to take care of further packages as they cross my way. My motivation to spend my time for free software is that it brings the power back to the engineers where it belongs to. We don't act because of financial interests, we act because we love the technology. Big companies like Microsoft have to grow or else they will die, so they grow no matter what, and that's a bad thing. They have the need to control everything, so they (and other companies of course) introduce things like TCPA, software patents and let's-see-what-they- will-come-up-with-in-the-future, which cuts away the freedom to access the technology and use it for whatever you want. They often say free software ruins the software industry because we give away software for free. Well, it really seems that you can't make the big buck with OSes these days :-) but you can certainly earn money by providing support, by writing documentation, by writing customized software for other companies. There is so much to do, but business models will change, that's for sure. I recognize that a healthy economy is crucial for a working community. I honestly think that free software is very very important for our branch. It should remain free." Per Olofsson <pelle> "I'm a 17-year-old student living in Stockholm, Sweden. I've been playing with computers for as long as I can remember, probably since the age of five or so. I have had some limited Unix experience before, but it wasn't until some five years ago I began using Linux. Starting with Redhat and Slackware, I eventually became enlightened by the wonderful world of Debian. I have also been working some at the Stockholm University's Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, where I have been the driving force in replacing almost all of the old Solaris systems with Debian. Slightly more than one year ago, I started maintaining the Ion packages in Debian. For those who don't know, Ion is the most brilliant window manager there is, and one of the probably very few that will not turn your desktop into a complete mess. Lately, I have also become the de facto maintainer of pcmcia-cs, which is a more complex and more popular package. I have not decided exactly what I want to do in the future. I have many ideas, so there is much to choose from. I very much fancy Debian, and it is in my interest to see the whole of it improve, get more popular, and closer to the goal of being the Universal Operating System. Right now I'm mostly worried about getting sarge released, so I hope I will be able to find time to aid the debian-installer effort, although I have to look after the packages I maintain as well. This is also related to PCMCIA, where I have been doing some work for the installer." Henning Makholm <henning> "I'm a computer scientist, 30 year old and just got my Ph.D., have been hacking in various languages since childhood. [...] For a long time, my home computer was not connected to the net except for a slow modem dial-in, so I was not able to contribute technically to the developent of Debian. Instead I started hanging around on debian-legal to help analyze software licenses (and participate in flamewars about the proper reading of the DFSG). This was a task that could be done from the university, where I had net connection but not access to a Debian box. [...] Why Debian and not some other worthy free software project? I have always had a soft spot for the "infrastructural" facets of the projects I hack - I tend to be the one who ends up doing the makefiles, the configuration-file-parsing engine, and that kind of stuff. This naturally leads to an interest in operating systems, tools, packaging and policy integration. I could have done similar things for one of the *bsd projects, but Debian seems to take a stronger (or at least more explicit) position wrt policy integration and software freedom, which suits me." -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/
