I recommend to accept Praveen Arimbrathodiyil as a Debian Developer. 1. Identification & Account Data -------------------------------- First name: Praveen Middle name: - Last name: Arimbrathodiyil Key fingerprint: 084623DBEEAB39E671665CCA3EB46FBCE0C010D0 Account: praveen 2. Background ------------- I started using computers when I was 13, we had PCs with DOS at school and we had to learn gwbasic! I came to know about GNU/Linux via news paper articles but I got to use it only when I started my engineering course. We had Red Hat Linux 9 on our college lab systems with monochrome terminals. I was system administrator of college lab by the time I was finishing my 4 year course and I got to try various distributions - slackware, suse and many more small ones. We had one debian server too in the lab. I was attracted by the Free Software philosophy and we started a GNU/Linux user group a foss event (http://fossmeet.in) in our college. I volunteered for http://foss.in and started organizing many small foss events and regular meeting of Free Software User Group Bangalore. We always focused our advocacy on students and got many contributors. Free Software contributions: I started my Free Software contributions via Debian Installer Malayalam translations. We reactivated Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (http://smc.org.in) and started maintaining translations of GNOME, KDE and other Free Software. As a community we worked on all aspects of language computing including fonts, complex text rendering, input methods and other tools like spell checkers, text to speech systems etc. We were part of Google Summer of Code in 2007 and I was a mentor (students I mentored that year became mentors for the next year!). I'm also helping with operations of Chamba Free/Open/Swathnthra/Libre/Mukt Cinema Project (http://chambaproject.in). Debian contributions: I started maintaining lekonee-gnome, a word press blog client written by my friend and colleague Kushal Das. I was always eager to try newer version of GNOME and KDE and so I started co-maintaining libdbusmenu-qt. I came to ruby packaging when I wanted to package diaspora federated social networking software (http://diasporaproject.org/) in debian. I was involved in many ruby gem transitions to new gem2deb based packaging helper. I have been giving many debian packaging sessions and helped organize many mini debian conferences across India (http://in2010.mini.debconf.org/and http://in2011.mini.debconf.org/). Motivation: My main motivation in Free Software is the spirit of building things we need as a community. Since I had so many things in my wishlist, I knew I have to get more people if I want to see all of them become a reality. So my motivation in contributing to Free Software is to get as many of my wishlist items a reality by working with people who share the same wishlist or at least some items in it. The reason I chose debian over other distributions is its volunteer and democratic/do-o-cratic nature. I wanted to spent my time with a community that would be an equal partner with Free Software community and I wanted my voice to be heard by the community based on my contributions (not to be rejected by people who are in positions of power, acquired by privileged processes not available to me). Focus: In debian I would like to focus on diaspora packaging, getting more contributors by organizing debian events and mentoring new contributors.
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