New Maintainers
Devin Carraway <devin@debian.org>
"Background: I started with Linux in 1993, in college. I came into it
from a background in the WWIV BBS community, which included a largish
group of people exchanging modifications to the BBS source; without
benefit of the Internet or exposure the free software movement, that
group had discovered in vague terms the benefits of open source -- most
significantly the ability to tear software open, make changes, and pass
those modifications on for others' benefit. That community died out
with the popularization of the Internet (and its remnants have never
gotten out of the proprietary rut the software was stuck in). I
gradually transitioned myself towards Linux while working on my CS
degree. Since then I've conducted essentially all of my career using
free software, as a sysadmin, web and embedded software engineer. I'm
enthusiastic about the use of OSS as a fundamentally correct way of
doing things with computers. It's also one of the main reasons I like
my work so much -- it enables working with software to be a process of
understanding rather than just doing."
Devin currently maintains acme, quelcom and sawfish-themes.
David Weinehall <tao@debian.org>
"Well, I've been maintainer of the 2.0-kernel of Linux for quite some
time, I'm an old C64 programmer, but since several year I'lve been
programming on Linux. I began using Linux and Free Software because I
grew tired of buggy software and the fact that did not have full control
over my system.
The reason I want to volunteer time is to give something back. I feel
that I have something to give."
David has a really funny web page at http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/
Paul Cupis <cupis@debian.org>
Paul currently maintains cdbakeoven, doctorj and guarddog.
Brian Nelson <pyro@debian.org>
"I have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, but I find computer science far
more interesting :) . I programmed professionally throughout college
and for a couple years after I graduated. I programmed mostly in C++,
especially with the Qt toolkit, but also have experience with C, Perl,
Java, Fortran, and others. Now, I'm looking toward pursuing a graduate
degree in computer science.
I was first introduced to Linux back in 1995 by my college roommate.
The merits of free software were obvious to me even back then, when
Linux was far more raw than it is now. Since then, I've always had
Linux installed on one machine or another and have been through the
whole gamut of distributions, including Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, and
Corel, before finally turning to Debian in early 2001.
I've decided to volunteer my time to Debian for several reasons. First
of all, I love the Debian community; there are some amazing and
brilliant people involved in the Debian project. Through the community,
I've learned far more in the past 2 years than I did in my previous five
years of Linux usage. Second, I enjoy the openness and democratic
nature of the project. I find it very satisfying that anything I
contribute, whether through package maintainance or by simply voicing my
opinions and views on the mailing lists, can have a direct impact on the
project. Finally, after using free software for several years, I enjoy
giving back to the free software community.
I have an assortment of interests regarding the Debian project. Most of
my work thusfar with Debian has been in package development. However,
I've also contributed documentation to Osamu's "Debian Reference" guide.
Furthermore, I've done some QA work by sending patches to the BTS.
Finally, I regularly offer support to Debian users on the mailing lists.
In the future, I plan to continue these activities, and would also like
to explore some other areas of the project. For example, I've been
keeping an eye on debian-installer development, and I'm hoping to find
some time in the near future to do some hacking on it."
Brian currently maintains: aspell-en, libclass-singleton-perl,
libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libtext-aspell-perl, pornview, qtella, scoop.
Giuseppe Sacco <eppesuig@debian.org>
"As you might imaging I am an italian, and I like it, but I like to
know how different peoples think. That's why I went to a far
university and the I worked for a foreign company.
I went to many countries in europe and (once) in central america.
And now i stay in Italy. That's way now I have time to spend on
Debian. I used to "only" coordinating the italian translation
because I did not had enough time. But now I think should be
possible.
Free Software has always been something I trusted: when I was at the
university I founded a meeting of Amiga developers. This meeting was
for exchanging informations and free software.
More than free software I trust free information, that's why I
started on w.d.o. If I recall correclt Free Information is one of
the social contract points. For the very same reason I write
articles for www.diff.org, an italian webzine for DIFFerent
software."
Robert Millan <rmh@debian.org>
"I'm a young computer-science student who has been interested
on GNU/Linux systems for quite some time.
I initially came to free software because it was technically superior
to the platform I normally used (windows); when i had some experience
with it I found the importance of it being 'free', and became
compromised with the free software movement.
Then I found the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, i were told that
it was hold by a volunteering effort and that their objectives were
freedom and quality, rather than benefits and market share.
I found it to my liking that a group or people could be generously
spending lots of time and effort to produce a good for the computer
user, so I decided to help with my spare time."
Robert currently maintaints bochs, plex86, plex86-doc, tubesock and
vgabios.
Mats Rynge <mats@debian.org>
"About me: I'm 25 years old and I am originally from Sweden. For about
five years ago I moved to Los Angeles with my girlfriend and went back
to school. At the moment I'm attending my last quarter as a CS undergrad
at UCLA. I also work part time for School of Engineering porting free
software to AIX (http://aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu). Our packages are
simple tar.gz's, and we do not have to worry about the base system,
but the porting part is more challenging. I basically see it as a good
experinece for becoming a Debian developer.
I'm an officer of the UCLA LUG (http://linux.ucla.edu), in which I am
of course trying to convert everybody to Debian. :) Just in our lounge
we have about 10 servers/users x86 boxes, one G4, and one SparcStation
running Debian. The next project is an SGI box that was donated by the
CS department...
I was introduced to Linux around 1995 (IIRC...). I went to a small
computer convention and saw Linux running X and the app that really
impressed me was xdaliclock (the one that "melts"). I bought a book that
included a Slackware CD. I got really hooked and it went from there to
Red Hat and then Debian 1.3.
I also started the linuxprogramming.com website, which I ran for a
couple of years. It was then aquired by Internet.com, and they shut it
down for about a year ago.
So, I do feel that it is time to give something back to Debian and the
Debian community. As you can tell, I already give up a lot of time to
Linux and open source/free software, and the basic reason behind it is
of course that I really like the mentality of open source."
Stefan Schimanski <schimmi@debian.org>
"With my knowledge of KDE I try help in packaging KDE3 for Debian
currently which unfortunately is not in Sid yet. Moreover I
frequently package applications I need for my own work. I would love
to not only do this for my own, but contribute my work to the
project. For instance I did the proofgeneral package which is already
in Sid, sponsored by Ralf Treinen. I am working on the whole Isabelle
tool chain (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/HVG/Isabelle/, a popular
theorem prover) currently to get it integrated into Debian."
Takeshi YAEGASHI <yaegashi@debian.org>
Takeshi is interested in embedded systems and wants to port Debian to
the SuperH (SH) architecture. He has already maintained his own Debian
distribution for SH for the last 6 months at http://debian.dodes.org/.
Takeshi has also ported eCos to the Playstation and is involved with
Linux on the Playstation. He's generally interested in Linux on Linux on
embedded systems, "I've tried many Linux ports almost just for fun at my
leisure. And I love GNU/Linux and the free programming environment.
It would be great if I could use GNU/Linux on my handheld devices and
game consoles rather than pre-installed software."
Martin A. Godisch <godisch@debian.org>
"Well, I'm a 24 year old student of computer science at Dresden University
of Technology. My first computer I bought in 1991, and mainly used it for
programming Turbo Pascal. I came to Linux in 1997 when I began my studies,
and the first distribution I tried was SuSE. A little later I also tried
Debian Bo, RedHat, and Slackware. I continued then using SuSE until the
release of Slink and then I changed to Debian. I also had some competent
Debian mentors at university, e.g. the admin of ftp.de.debian.org. Today
I'm using Debian at home and at work and I'm responsible for several
servers at university and some workstations and notebooks, all running
Debian.
Besides administration my main interest is IT security, that includes
things like cryptography, anonymity/pseudonymity, firewalls, intrusion
detection. I would like to extract some of my ideas concerning security in
order to make Debian a little more secure by default. In my free time I
often do programming, mostly helpers for administrative tasks. Sometimes a
piece of software can be extracted which may be usefull for others as
well, so I found out that it's a nice feeling to know that other people
use software written by oneself. I enjoy receiving feature requests from
the end of the world and to fullfill them, maybe making someone happy..."
Oliver Kurth <oku@debian.org>
"I am author of 'masqmail', which is an MTA designed for hosts without
permanent internet conection (eg. hosts/small LANs at home, notebooks,
possibly PDAs). I maintain the debian package of it, it was previously
maintained by Gregor Hoffleit (flight@debian.org), but he orphaned it.
I would also maintain other packages, and I am already looking for
interesting packages. Since I have experience in creating installation
CDs, I may also help with the debian-installer or pgi."
Oliver currently maintains five packages: masqmail, ifplugd, dumpasn1,
tcpreen and memtester. He has a few other packages in his non-official
repository.
Emmanuel le Chevoir <mms@debian.org>
Emmanuel currently maintains fluxconf and xsmbrowser.
Mark J Ray <mjr@debian.org>
MJ Ray is involved in the Association For Free Software
http://www.affs.org.uk/
"While sysadminning Debian systems, I backported packages from unstable
and testing to run on stable and locally packaged other software. I've
tried to help in reporting and fixing bugs in Debian packages. It's
actually one of those bugfixes that has finally made me bow to Thom
[May]'s pressure and apply for NM: wily, a package I use every session,
has been orphaned and then booted out of debian with a long list of silly
bugs."
Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>
"I'm interested in:
maintaining packages
qa work
porting packages to the Hurd, BSDs, m68k, PowerPC, mips (for PSX2)
using debain on clusters (beowulf)
debian-installer
get debconf on all install-time interactive packages
i18n somehow
My first contact with computers was with a MSX Hit-Bit 55P, only to play.
Then the first IBM PC appeared in my home in 1992, used m$dos for some
years, dual booting it with Win9x, and later with WinNT.
In 1996 wanted to learn to program and my first try was Qbasic (only
with the m$dos help system), two days reading and gave up (was so
horrible ;), then I got a book about Turbo Pascal.
I was very interested in the system internals, so learned Assembler.
Found Ralf Brown Interrupt List, and went down and down on m$dos.
More low level docs came to feed my mind.
I needed a powerful low-level language, so C was next, also C++.
Discovered DJGPP and the beauties of free software. Discovered Linux and
bought a book about SVR4, obtained a Slackware 3.1 and started trying
it from a boot disk. Also learned by reading alot of free softwre src
code, specially the linux kernel src.
In 1997 learned Shell script, and Awk. Got Internet access and built
an intranet in my home, my interest in networking grew more than the
simple multigame IPX/SPX experiences over serial links in m$dos days.
In 1998 switched to Debian Hamm, until now, using Woody, Sarge and Sid.
3D got my interest, and started thinking about a 3D artificial life
simulator. Also an excuse to implement and reuse a 3D engine for a pet
OS I had in mind. My cluster needs expaned as I envisioned that the
simulator would be a very high processor consumer, and started
accumulating old Pentium boxes (currently 24, including a dual Pentium).
In 1999 learned tcl/tk and javascript, but as I have not used them much,
I'm not good at those.
In 2000 I got curious about Lisp, so took some books from the library.
Also near the end of the year I _delurked_ in a newsgroup, and started
contributing back to the comunity at first throught the news, then
subscribed to some debian mailing lists, and started posting.
In 2001 as part of two classes I had to learn SML and Prolog. Completed
my switch to Debian. Subcribed to alot of Debian mailing lists, and
decided finally to take some steps to became a DD (if accepted), taking
advantage of a cheap travel to Madrid (as in Barcelona there are no DDs)
to meet with Amaya to get my gpg key signed. Since then I have been
learning the Debian internals, habits, sending patches to the bts, and
preparing to be a DD.
2002 reached, installed the Hurd and ported some applications, I hope
to have time and install also some of the BSD familiy to help the
porting efforts, also to put my hands on my father's PowerPC.
I have always felt that software should be free (really all things,
but maybe that is too much uthopic :). When I discovered free software,
it was like a light at the end of a tunnel, since then I'm a strong
supporter, and try to use only free software, develop and help
improve it, believing that this can bring us a better world."
Thanks to James Troup for approving those people and to the AMs/NMs for
writing the summaries.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
Reply to: