AM report for Mike Gabriel
I recommend to accept Mike Gabriel as a Debian Developer.
1. Identification & Account Data
--------------------------------
First name: Mike
Middle name: -
Last name: Gabriel
Key fingerprint: 9BFBAEE86C0AA5FFBF2207829AF46B3025771B31
Account: sunweaver
2. Background
-------------
== About me ==
My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 39 years old and I live in
Neudorf-Bornstein (between Kiel and Eckernförde), Germany. I am
partially employed as a system administrator and partially running a
business as IT consultant and from time to time get contracted as a
free software developer.
During the last 4 years, I have also attended classes in osteopathy.
Before that I have studied Visionary Cranio Sacral Work(TM) and worked
in my own practise. The osteopathy training is currently on hold due
to a recent family re-configuration (see below).
Privately, I live with a wonderful wife and one to four children
(patchwork family). The eldest daughter is 15 years old, the youngest
son is only seven months young, the other two girls are in the middle
range of the spectrum (7 and 11).
== How I came to GNU/Linux and free software ==
I got in contact with free software at the Ecology Centre, Kiel
University. Unfortunately, the institute does not exist in its
original form anymore, but at one of the high tides of the institute
(2003-2006) I had the pleasure of being head of the network
administration team. As the workgroup's head, one of my tasks was to
coordinate provision of IT infrastructure for natural scientific
research and teaching to the whole institute. The server backend
(Samba, DB services, Plone server, mail server, ..) was fully based on
GNU/Linux (Debian).
However, at that time and still till 2010 I had mostly been a power
user of GNU/Linux, only from time to time contributing to free open
source projects (e.g. product contributions to Plone, patch
contributions to Horde and Kolab).
In 2010, my partner and I personally met Kurt Gramlich (Debian Edu
project) and that was the trigger point for starting to contribute
continuously to several free software projects, mostly Debian Edu and
X2Go at first.
Since then, I have become one of the core developers of X2Go and I
also am an active member of the Debian Edu development group. Lately,
I have worked a lot together with Lisandro Pérez Meyer, who became my
regular Debian sponsor somewhere in spring 2012. A big thanks to
Lisandro from here!!!
Locally, together with two friends and cooperation partners, I have
set up a free software project for schools around Kiel. During the
last year we have deployed Debian Edu squeeze at four schools
in/around Kiel and we are about to sign regular support contracts with
the first schools. The special approach in this project (name:
IT-Zukunft Schule) is to combine communication skills with free
software based technologies and to enrol people in the concept of free
software, transparent workflows, turning errors into a learning
process, etc.
== Why I want to volunteer my time ==
Volunteering my time for free software projects is what I currently
do, anyway. Becoming a member of the Debian community, though, will
surely increase my efficiency in the work I already do, I guess.
The reason for giving my time to free software development is: I
strongly believe that using free software is (one of ) _the_ world's
future.
Making high quality (multi-lingual) software and its (multi-lingual)
documentation available to everyone, will facilitate the communication
of people from all over the world. Free software can facilitate
education in parts of the worlds where the payments of license costs
are simply unaffordable. Recently, I got really touched when I saw the
ITP for gnuhealth--a project providing hospital administration as free
software.
However, also as a sustainable business model, I continuously
recommend the re-input from business projects into free software
development, where possible. If a free software is already used inside
the company and e.g. an add-on feature is developed internally, my
recommendation for the development workflow is to propose the work to
upstream under a free license at the end of the development cycle and
consult upstream at certain stages of the development process, as well.
Another aspect of volunteering is this: Becoming a permanent
contributor to the free software realm during the last two years has
got me in touch with so many people from so many different places. The
natural process of getting networked with other developers from all
over the planet simply feels awesome!!!
== Contributions I made to Debian ==
1. Packaging
I am maintaining the packages listed at [0]. I have worked with the
Debian Edu (packaging) team and am one of the founders of the quite
new X2Go packaging team (together with Reinhard Tartler). I prefer
maintaining packages in team contexts where possible, so I contacted
other Debian teams while uploading the following packages (actually:
having had the following packages uploaded by Lisandro): DMEM for
fullscreen-extension, reloadevery; DPMT for python-pampy.
[0] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mike.gabriel%40das-netzwerkteam.
2. Debian Edu
For my work around Debian Edu, you can read an interview that Petter
Reinholdtsen did with me [1]. I have been a core contributor for the
auto-configuration of the Debian Edu (squeeze) main-server as a Samba
PDC. (The Kerberos part of the work are Andreas Mundt's laurels!!!)
[1]
http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html
3. Becoming a Debian Maintainer (DM)
On Oct 13th 2012 Lisandro has advocated me becoming a DM, so the
status is still very fresh[2]. However, Petter Reinholdtsen gave the
impulse (first by mistake, he mixed up DM and DD in my application
mail) to advocate me becoming a DD right away [3]. Lisandro agreed
with that [4] after a private communication between the two and so
here we go... :-)
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2012/10/msg00028.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2012/10/msg00040.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2012/10/msg00042.html
4. Work on the debbugs software
While setting up the debbugs software for the X2Go upstream project, I
sent several patches to Don Armstrong for review. All of the patches
got committed to debbugs.git's master branch (with one follow-up
commit with a minor fix) [5].
[5]
http://git.donarmstrong.com/?p=debbugs.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/mike_patches
== Primary areas of interest, goals ==
I am particularly involved in X2Go development, currently. At the very
moment I am working on a community version of an X2Go Session Broker
implemented in Python using the web.py framework.
X2Go is mostly developed and tested on Debian systems. A customer of
mine is really focused on getting X2Go closer to Ubuntu, as well, so
that will take some focus for my future upstream X2Go development, as
well.
For the next months I also have plans to support Andreas Mundt with
his fresh (and also already quite mature) Debian LAN project. I see
Debian LAN as the potential for an underlying network site
configuration tool for Debian blends like Debian Edu or Debian Med.
For balancing out that amount of computer based work during the week,
I go swimming several times per week. The rest of my time currently
belongs to my family, esp. my new born son and my wonderful wife. In
2013 I hope to pick up my osteopathy training again and finalize those
studies.
--
Eugene V. Lyubimkin aka JackYF, JID: jackyf.devel(maildog)gmail.com
C++ GNU/Linux userspace developer, Debian Developer
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