This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 27 Feb 2005. 4 applicants became maintainers. Volker Christian <voc> Thats really a long story! I got my first computer nearly 20 years ago. It was a Sinclair ZX-81 (1 KB-RAM :-). It was fun to play with it and to learn the basic programming techniques. My first contact with a computer language was - of course - BASIC. But soon I also have tried to program this small thing in machine language. Time goes on and my next computer was a Apple II (64 KB-RAM, 1 MHz 6502). The native language (built into the Apples ROM) was again BASIC but I bought two floppy disc drives (160 KB each) which enables me to learn and use Pascal and the assembler language supported by the Apple Macro Assembler! I could tell you - this machine was really cool. After this period i got my first IBM compatible 80286 with MS-DOS 3.3. It was a huge step forward concerning memory and speed but coding wasn't fun anymore. And so i stopped coding until the early 1990s. I have just started my physics studies. Physicists only use UNIX workstations for their work - and so i had my first contact with that kind of operating system. I was totally fascinated about the concept of UNIX and C - I nearly couldn't stop to investigate this system. Soon I heard about a free "UNIX" for ix86 architectures - Linux. I saw it at a friends computer and I quickly realized, that this is the OS of my choice for my home PC. And coding suddenly was fun again. During my studies i started to support "new media" artists with my technical knowledge and my knowledge about linux. I realized many exciting projects in this area with the Austrian broadcasting cooperation (ORF (http://www.orf.at) and the Ars Electronica Center (http://www.aec.at) which is one of the world leading new media centers. You can find further informations about this projects on my present homepage http://www.soft.uni-linz.ac.at/About_Us/Staff/Christian/index.php During the years i have tried to replace commercial software as far as possible with open source software from my desktop. I found that in many areas open source software is more reliable than commercial software and that the concepts behind open source software are much more mature than those of commercial software especially MS software. Around a year ago I noticed a project called SynCE (http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce) which has the goal to implement the "ActiveSync" protocol (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wceactsy/html/ceoriActiveSync.asp) on linux. Because this project only implements the low-level calls I found that it is necessary to implement some user-level programs. So i started to code a application based on KDE and SynCE which I called SynCE-KDE and which should behave like ActiveSync. The reason that this is a piece of software which - i belief - is helpful for some people and my political conviction to replace MS software a widely as possible and third, that i got so much cool software From the open software community i decided to give something back to the community. Just now i am working with great effort on the SynCE-KDE (http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/kde). But why Debian? I was a Slackware user since my early Linux days. But about a year ago the last Slackware distribution 8.0 was terribly buggy that i decided to look for an other distribution with fits in my needs and is "compatible" with my political conviction. I have tried RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake and some other - and also Debian. After some time using Debian I found, that i have missed something till now. It really satisfied me with its package and release system. So Debian becomes MY new distribution. If you want to distribute software you also have to think how to do this. As i am a Debian user it was natural for my to try to support also debian packages of SynCE-KDE. That is also one of the main reasons why I want to become a Debian Maintainer - I will be able to support the official debian packages of SynCE-KDE by myself. Nevertheless, I also intent to package other peoples software for Debian. He maintains agsync, dynamite, kcemirror, libmimedir, librapi2, librra, libsynce, orange, synce-dccm, synce-kde, synce-multisync-plugin, synce-serial and unshield. Neil McGovern <neilm> He maintains drivel. Jay Berkenbilt <qjb> He maintains nip2 and vips7.10. He is also co-maintainer for libxml-xerces-perl, xerces23, xerces24, xerces25 and xerces26 Jeremy Lainé <sharky> I am a French / British binational and was born in The Netherlands. I have lived in The Netherlands, France, the US and Sweden, and enjoy the cultural diversity that comes with this sort of lifestyle! I am an engineer by training, more specifically in the field of telecommunications. [...] The more I got acquainted with the Free Software world, the more I was impressed by the thousands of people out there volunteering time and effort to develop software and provide support to the users. I have doing my best to give back what I can to the community. I wrote a kernel module and some utilities to support a portable MP3 player I use under Linux (http://mpf70.sourceforge.net/). I also helped my father rewrite in C++ a sail design package called Sailcut he has been writing for years and convinced him to make it Free Software (http://sailcut.sourceforge.net/). This project is very rewarding as it has an active user base of both professional and amateur users. I also maintain Diogenes, a content management system (http://opensource.polytechnique.org/diogenes/) which has been in the Debian Archive (package "diogenes") for a couple of months thanks to my sponsor Matthew Palmer. As far as contributing to Debian is concerned, I would like to start by packaging web-related applications and help improve existing ones. To this end I have submitted a number of patches for wwwconfig-common, which Ola Lundqvist recently applied and uploaded. I am also interested in helping mentoring potential new maintainers. Later on I would quite like to look into things such as the debian-installer as this has a big impact on how users experience Debian.
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