Report for 'Debian Developer, uploading' applicant Ian James Campbell
Hello,
I recommend to accept Ian James Campbell as a new Debian Developer, uploading.
The account name is ijc.
* Applicant background
I was first exposed to Unix during my gap year before starting
university which I spent working as a developer on (proprietary)
embedded OS kernels at a company whose infrastructure was all SunOS and
Solaris based. I liked it enough that I wanted to run something similar
on my own machines and Linux was the obvious choice. I initially started
out on Red Hat but later switched to Debian around Potato time, based
mostly on word of mouth about its technical strengths and the fact that
it was a community driven distribution (this was pre-Fedora). I started
following the lists and began to appreciate the philosophical aspects of
Free Software.
After University I worked at an embedded hardware manufacturer producing
an embedded Linux distro (which I modelled heavily on Debian) for their
hardware platforms, where I took my first steps into contributing to the
Linux kernel and eCos (a Free embedded OS). From there I moved to
XenSource (the company behind the Xen hypervisor, which later become
part of Citrix) which allowed me to begin working with and contributing
to more Free Software communities. After an initial focus on the
upstream development side I spent a few years on productisation front
but in the last couple of years I have been focusing entirely on
upstream development and maintenance again as part of a team within
Citrix dedicated to this. I'm fortunate enough that this means I can
spend some (smallish) amount of work time on Debian-ish things although
this is by no means my only motivation -- I have plenty of my own
personal itches to scratch!
My main areas of interest within Debian are mostly at the lower levels
e.g. kernel support for new platforms, as well as improvements to
existing platforms. I've also worked on installer and cd improvements
where necessary to enable the use of a platform. For example I maintain
the Xen support in the kernel and implemented support for installation
as a Xen guest in Debian installer, similarly I added support to the
kernel and installer for the Dreamplug (ARM plug computer) platform. I
also maintain the qcontrol utility for QNAP devices (ARM based NAS).
In the future I expect to be doing more of the same. I'm working quite a
bit on ARM devices at the moment and with ARM making a move into the
server space I'm keen for Debian to be an option on those platforms.
Regards,
Enrico Zini
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