Thorsten Sauter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Well, I'm working now since eight years with linux (starting with kernel 1.3.25), and doing more and more work with it. I'm working currently as sysadmin and advise many unix-based systems. I have used many different linux distributions starting with suse, then redhat and finally I have stopped on debian. Debian is a very good distribution, ready for bussines and ready for desktop. I'm using debian now on over 25 machines, at home and at work, and I have become more and more familiar with the concepts and ideas behind debian. Now it's time to give something back to the community. Not only with blank sayings, but with real work. Thats my intend to do for debian.
I have also started my own development project (called grdesktop), which is of course published under the GPL, and is a little piece, which I can do for all the people around the world which spend their time for free software. Btw grdesktop will currently checked from the gnu-team to become offical GNU software. Now, back to debian. As you can see I spend many time to package useful (hope so) package for the debian distribution, and I write bugreports however I found a bug. Often, if is possible for me, with patches attached. I'm also help the debian-boot team to create the new debian-installer, maybe not enough, but I'm working on it. I'm testing parts of the installer, and write some new code, in the hope it will be integrated into d-i. Why getting an offical DD state. Now, it help me to package my software easier, because I can now test it on all the different machines, and I can upload the software faster, if a bugreport was posted. Vincent Sander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> My name is Vincent Sanders, I was born in the UK and currently live in yorkshire just outside of leeds. I am married and have two young children. My main intended area of contribution will be concerned with the ARM port of debian, I have already contributed towards this effort working with Othmar Pasteka and Phil Blundell to add a new hardware sub architecture (riscstation) to the ARM port. My next target is to assist with the new debian-installer package and port it to the ARM target. I also hope to contribute debian packages of several small Open source programs I have written and possibly take on the packageing of some other programs I use which are not currently packaged. I started working with Linux during University in 1994. Some friends and myself built a Linux server from an old 386 with 8Mb memory and downloaded slackware on floppy disc. Since that time I have continued to benefit from numerous Open Source projects (including obviously Debian), because of this I have felt that when opportunity presented itself I should return something to the community. In the past this has included releaseing the source to several programs I wrote to "scratch an itch". Recently I have a job in which I am in a position to access several ARM based systems and my employer encorouages my improving Debian on these systems. In future there may even be the opportunity to contribute hardware as has already been done for the netBSD community. Andrew Pollock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I am nearly 26 years old, and from Australia. I have been using Linux since I was about 19. I was first introduced to Debian by a co-working at an ISP I worked at, and we migrated to it from Slackware, so it was my first exposure to binary packages, which I found quite cool. I think the idea of Free Software is great, firstly because it's cheap, and secondly because it means it's easier to make functionality modifications yourself if you're that way inclined. I initially intend to maintain some existing software packages in Debian (and I already am), but I currently work in IT Security, so I have an interest in assisting the security group, and I also have a number of years of system administration experience, so if I could be of any assistance there, I would find it most satisfying. I also like coding in PHP, so again, if I could be of any assistance there, that would also be enjoyable for me. Andre Luis Lopes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Andre currently maintains ibackup and is active in the Debian-BR project. Ayman Negm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> He comes from Egypt and lives in Germany. He is a Software Developer at SoftCare GmbH www.softcare.de where he developes Plugins for Adobe InDesign and Adobe InCopy. He is married and has a little daughter. Tommaso Moroni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I began to use Linux in 1999 after a friend of mine introduced it to me. I've always been attracted by the philosophy behind it, and in particular by how people could develop good software without being payed. That's why, after half year switching from a distribution to another, I finally chose Debian as my preferred one. After a while I decided to contribute to Debian in some way, and given the fact I hadn't much programming experience those days, I joined the Debian Description Translation Project efforts. Since I began to attend university I've gained some experience, so I adopted an orphaned Debian package (dact). I would like to contribute mainly as a package maintainer, even if I'd like to help with the debian-installer and by writing man pages, as well as translating as I did in the past. I want to volunteer my time to Debian because after all this years using it I'd like to return the favour. Besides by adopting a package I learnt a lot of things I otherwise would have never learnt. And finally I think Debian is an effort where the ideals of Free Software give tangible results. Goedson Teixeira Paixao <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'm from Brazil and am currently a Computer Science PhD candidate at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Besides my Computer Science research I, currently, do e-business software development (mainly in Java) and also do users support in a non-profit religious organization of which I'm a member. Edelhard Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> On my private Debian page http://www.edelhard.de/debian_en.html you can find my "Linux-History" and the (first) application i want to maintain. larswm is, for someone who never heard of tiling window managers, a somewhat "strange" way of organizing a desktop. The great number of developers worldwide give this broad spectrum of applications. I'd like to make this still a bit broader and, of course, more stable, e.g. see my bug report http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=3D164189 My computer history started with a german Apple II clone in ca. 1983 (with 16k expansion, CP/M and UCSD Pascal). Next step was a no-name (Taiwan) '386 clone (just because i couldn't affort a Macintosh..). On this PC i first used MS-DOS (relativly stable and straight-forward). Getting more of RAM (i think it was 4MB), unused with DOS, i used OS/2 (1.2, 1.3 and Warp 3) for some time. On the University i got in touch with Unix, so i "leaned" a Interactive Unix/386 from our Admin, later i bought Coherent Unix. When Linux became useable for C development, i switched over (that was kernel 0.99pl11, in 1994, right?). Now we have a company (see http://www.software-manufaktur.de/) where we program PC-based automation systems, using QNX for hard realtime and (RTAI-) Linux for "soft"/no realtime. Our office runs completely Micro$oft free. Brian Nelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Brian currently maintains vux and iptstate. Hilko Bengen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I am 27 years old and study CS at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Then, I still tried and compiled a lot of things on my own but never got around to looking at what happens when you build a package. But that changed when I started working part-time at planNET GmbH (which is now called toplink-plannet), a local ISP. toplink-plannet uses Debian(potato) as its only Linux distribution for own machines as well as customer gateways. Part of my job had to do with back-porting woody packages and creating our own packages from commercial software. Xavier Roche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The reason I want to become a Debian developper is that I really like this system, its philosophy, and I want to help the building process, especially by packaging one of my softwares (and surely more packages when I will be totally ready). I have been developping for quite some time now (started on Atari ST in 1987), and used my first slackware on a Falcon. I developped many freewares and utilities, and few sharewares on ST. Then I switched to i386 machines, and in parallel I begun to develop on Linux and Unix systems. At this point I started to develop with other folks a spider called httrack in 1998, and few months after, I decided to switch it to GPL. Developping is for me a job but also a hobby, and because I regularly use GPL software and Linux, and because I like the philosophy behind it, I continued to develop few things and promote the GPL movement (for example when my former company, Serianet, stopped its activities in 2000, I and the former boss acquired the intellectual rights of the software (a groupware) to put it on GPL. The groupware is Sherpath, at http://www.sherpath.org/) Pierre Machard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Pierre Machard is a student in University of Vannes (France). He's been using GNU/Linux for 4 years now. Debian GNU/Linux has been his only OS for more than 1 year and a half. His first difficulties were with the English language. So he decided that he would help to improve i18n and l10n in GNU/Linux. More than one year ago, he started contributing to debian-l10n-french. Nowadays, Pierre is an administrator of Tuxfamily. Tuxfamily hosts more than 1200 people who develop Free Software. He says: "For Debian, I am used to translating dsa, and dwn. I worked on boot-floppies documentation. I used to work for Debian for one year. I have writting permission on the webwml cvsroot. I wish to improve access to the documentation in Debian and to formalize my implication in the project" Stephen Weeks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I am 31, have been developing software since age 1982, and have been working on compilers since 1989. I have a BA and MS in computer science. I have been using Linux since 1993. In 1997, while at the NEC research institute, I started work on MLton (www.mlton.org), a compiler for Standard ML that runs on Linux. NEC released it under the GPL in 1999, and I have been maintaining it since then. In 2001, Barak Pearmutter ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) created MLton packages for Debian. In August of 2002, I agreed to take over the packaging duties from him. Thanks to Martin Loschwitz who helped compiling this list. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]