This is a summary of the AM Report for Week Ending 14 Sep 2003. 7 applicants became maintainers.
Jon Bernard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Well, my name is Jon Bernard. I live in Blacksburg Virginia. I am a CS Graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VA Tech). I started using GNU/Linux as an undergraduate CS student. My story is probably similar to many, free software seemed to make perfect sense to me. I decided to learn as much as I could and write as much free software as possible. I really want to see free software succeed and be widely distributed and used. To that end, I decided to become a debian developer so that I could help lift Debian to a new level of free software excellence. As a developer, I intend to maintain the packages that I currently have, package software that isn't included in debian yet, write new free software, and be a substantial advocate for free software and the debian project. This fits in directly with The Social Contract. Jon maintains e16keyedit, e16menuedit, libfam-ruby, libimlib2-ruby, and xfonts-knickers Jesus Climent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I have been using Linux for almost 8 years. Started at the university, installing a computer with Linux to provide email accounts to the student guild (At that time only univ staff had email). I have been actively using and administering Linux systems since that time, getting more and more involved with the Linux community by actively sending bug reports, and testing different pieces of software in exotic hardware. I was co-founder of PoLinux, the Linux Association at my university, and I have bees volunteering my free time to administer the server and improve the web pages (which I rewrote during a weekend due to a frustration when I was trying to change an image in all the pages). One year ago I joined HispaLinux, the Spanish biggest Linux UG. since I joined, I have been administering the main servers, using Debian and learning about the packaging system and tricks. My distribution of choice is Debian, after being a Slackware, RedHat and Mandrake devotee. But so far I feel my effort has been focusing on providing feedback and helping others to get closer to Linux, while I believe now I want to give the effort back to a project based entirely on volunteers, thus being able to give back what I have received. Jesus maintains abcde, mcplay, pconsole, rssh, and co-maintains spamassassin Jamin Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I've been working with Linux since mid-1999. After a short time using it, I was convinced that I could make a full switch to it from Windows. Since early 2000, I've used Linux as my only OS at home and my main OS at work (Windows is still needed for some proprietary tools). I've tried many different distributions and even began work on one of my own (based on Crux). As I neared completion of my first attempt at an install-able and usable install, a user of my firewall script questioned my reasoning behind building my own distribution. During the course of our discussions, he encouraged me to give Debian another try. I had previous examined Debian but was turned off by the relative age of some of the packages (I didn't at that time grasp the functionality of the three tiered release). I use quite a number of different Open Source packages and wanted to give something back to the community. After finding Debian (the second time) and having a better understanding of it's goals, I'm convinced that Debian is a good fit. Jamin maintains jabber, jabber-aim, jabber-msn, jabber-muc, jabber-yahoo, mediamate, moviemate Andrés Roldán <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The reason for I want to become a Debian maintainer is simple. Debian is the main distribution that contributes and applies the free software and open source thoughts showing how powerful could be a good maintained GNU/Linux distribution. Moreover, Debian had help me becoming a GNU/Linux lover and a fellow of the phrase: "the knowledge must belong to the world". I want to contribute to this great project, and currently, I love to. Andrés maintains lilo, mtop, netstat-nat, prelink, and valgrind Matthias Urlichs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OK... the first work I did with Unix was in the context of Apple's old A/UX Unix, which was a cobbled-together hybrid of Sys5 and BSD networking. I wrote a driver for an ISDN card for it. It became apparent really fast that debugging such a thing without access to open source code (meaning, it's not enough to be able to look at the code -- I need to make modifications, and recompile) the task becomes impossible. Anyway, after not making the system stable enough for production use I then switched to Linux/i386 and ported the code to the new environment. At the time, Linux 0.99.whatever had no usable internal queueing and no Internet-ready network code, so I took some not-quite-legal Streams code, the NetBSD networking core, the rest of the kernel, and hooked everything together. ;-) That worked (rather well, in fact), but the main lesson I leaned from this is that programming alone is a Bad Thing, and being unable to share your code is even worse in a couple of major ways. These days, I use Debian on i386, ARM and PPC machines; I intend to mainly do QA-related things (i.e. "find out why this code doesn't work on PPC", "here's the changes to get that code to cross-compile smoothly") work, and help with prodding people and maybe NMUing stuff (like the blocked Perl 5.8 and Python 2.2 moves from Unstable into Testing). On the programming side, my major strengths are debugging, and protocol / systems design. I want to share my time because, pragmatically, if I want the code running on my systems to have some feature or other, and nobody else coded them into the programs I'd like to use, then obviously I'll have to do the work myself ;-) Sharing this work with other people means that (a) they have more time to work on other nifty features, and (b) ideally my new feature and their new feature co-exist nicely -- re-integrating a change into every new upstream release is not my idea of productive work. Matthias maintains datafudge, fdflush, festival, festival-doc, festlex-cmu, festlex-poslex, festlex-kallpc16k, festvox-kallpc8k, festvox-kdlpc16k, festvox-kdlpc8k, kforth, python-docutils, speech-tools, videogen, festlex-oald, festvox-ellpc11k Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Oh. At the moment, I'm studying mathematics at the University of Stuttgart. I'm mainly interested in representation theory, but currently attending other courses to get my diploma. Besides this, I work at the computing centre of the university, in the security team (RUS-CERT). I currently focus on the development of new services and fake network security. In addition, I regularly write articles for our security news service (<http://cert.uni-stuttgart.de/ticker/>). I'm an Ada enthusiast, and hope to abolish buffer overflows by (slowly) rewriting critical software in Ada. ;-) I intend to work mostly on Ada-related packages, and on security policies (e.g. Debian's approach towards X.509 browser CAs, or the measures to be taken after the inevitable first big Debian security compromise). And I'm going to package a few Perl modules which we need at work. In quite a few cases, I will be able to help with concrete security issues, I guess. But there's an obstacle: I won't participate in hiding information from users, because I believe this is morally wrong. However, I respect that the Debian Project doesn't share my view at the moment and interprets the Social Contract differently, and I intend to make sure that this will not result in a dilemma, neither for the Debian project, nor the Security Team, nor for me. Debian is an important tool, both at work and for my home network. I don't expect this will change during the next few years, so I better make sure that Debian remains such a useful tool. And it's only fair if I give back some of the time Debian helps me to save on system administration. In addition, it bugs me that we can't recommend Debian officially at RUS-CERT. Relying on Debian introduces many risks. Some of them are inherent to the project, some can be mitigated. By becoming more involved with Debian, I hope to better understand the internal procedures, and contribute improvements and/or document the risks, so that we can recommend Debian one day. Florian maintains ada-reference-manual, xml2rfc Graham Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I have packaged two applications for debian already, which have already been sponsored (xmlto by Christophe Barbe and kernel-patch-ck by David Kimdon). I have an ITP out for cog, and and ITA for transformiix, which is stalled because of its insane build process. I am also thinking about adopting gadfly. Graham maintains bsdmainutils, colordiff, pgpdump, and xmlto Thanks to Pascal Hakim for compiling this listing. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]