This is a summary of the AM reports for the first semester of 2006. 36 applicants became maintainers.
Marcela Tiznado <mlt> I've started using Gnu/Linux on 1998. Im an active member of CaFeLug (Capital Federal GNU/Linux User Group) since 2002. I've worked on some projects like a Wifi Lan along Buenos Aires using Free Software and Free Contents, Debian introductory talks, InstallFests, Solution days, etc. I like being in contact with people which its new at Free Software. I want to join Debian, to give back some work to the Comunity. It's the distribution I use and I've been using for long time. I'm specially interested on working on some topics like the Web Application Policy, cause most of them are messy. I've started an alioth project about, I will keep working on that. Why working on Debian and not with other distro? Well, I like very much the way its organized and how it works. Dominic Hargreaves <dom> My interest in Linux is largely as a sysadmin - I have been using Linux since aroud 1998 and extensively since 2000 as a student. Since 2002 I have been a professional sysadmin in academia, and recently, an ISP environment. More generally I enjoy the use of free software because of the empowerment, choice and value it provides compared to proprietory systems. I became interested in Debian in early 2001 and have been using it ever since, exclusively now at home and work. I value its sheer range of packages and reputation it has for high quality, and I would like to contribute to this. I am strongly in favour of keeping Debian a high quality distribution that produces stable releases. As my main contribution to Debian to date I have packaged a CGI application (and many associated perl modules, some of which have already been uploaded to Debian) that I'm involved with. When the application matures sufficiently I plan to upload it to Debian too. I have also adopted an orphaned package and aim to diligently report bugs in the distribution whenever possible. I have also taken an interest in the testing-security team, and although since changing jobs haven't had much time to contribute, I helped maintain their database of security issues in sarge prior to release. I would like to continue to develop packages for Debian as well as undertake general QA and bug-tracking issues as time permits if I am made a Debian developer. Kari Pahula <kaol> I am currently a math major in the University of Turku, in Finland, nearing graduation. My initial contact with GNU/Linux came in around 1997 when I installed Redhat on my computer. My initial interest in free software was technical, but I soon discovered the philosophical side of it and found it agreeable. I moved to use Debian around 1999 with Slink, largely attracted by Debian's community based developement model. To me, being part of a community is a major motivation for working on free software. I find the immediate feedback and equality invigorating. My contributions to Debian have so far primarily consisted of package maintenance and sending the occasional patch to other maintainers. I largely intend to keep on doing the same in the future. Rudy Godoy <rudy> Hi, I've been involved in free software since 1997. I'm founding member and currently on board of directors for APESOL[0] (Free Software Association) here in PerÃ. Also started DebianPeru[1] user group last year (2004). When I learned about Debian Project and its philosophy I found that I shared the vision, since my interest for free software are in social and philosophical but also in technical matters. So I started to use and then contribute to Debian since around 2001-2002 and advocating it on the places I went to give talks. It actually gave good results over here and Debian is gaining more adoption and presence. My work in Debian is mostly focused on localisation to spanish, working as translator of different pieces of documentation and software like d-i, debconf templates and in charge of DWN translation coordination since 2003. I've also maintain packages on the archive and work with the Xfce team and Debian Jr subproject. Lately I've been focusing more on quality and software testing and trying to help on its improvement. On the other side I've also been part of the organisation team for DebConf4 and currently helping on DebConf6 team. My interest on the future are to focus more on quality and better integration between the different kind of software that Debian ships. Also is in my interest to help to make Debian to have more adoption from ISVs and enterprise by cooperating with them, and also standards certifications like LSB. 0- http://www.apesol.org 1- http://www.debianperu.org Riccardo Setti <giskard> I'm Riccardo Setti and I'm 18 years old. I live in Italy and I study at the secondary school. One years ago I did my first installation of linux, obviously Debian. In december 2003 I tried to build my first package needing it for my work. Since this moment I'am interesting about the development of debian. For Debian I have translated some documents and I am the maintainer of some packages, and this is what I wish to do in debian (for now). Paul Waite <paulwaite> Well regarding myself, I am 48 and have been writing software in various forms for about 30-odd years. This started with PL/1 on an IBM-360 mainframe at Durham University, UK and then 'C' at the same place. As the 'personal computer' came along, I graduated with a Ph.D. in Physics, and went down to Wembley in London, Uk to work on Laser Optics. My passion for software found various outlets there, where I designed and built things like single-board computers (building hardware was also a passion!), and wrote the OS for it in Z-80 assembler. Since 1999 I've been the 6th Director of a small IT company called Catalyst IT here in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. I have been using Php almost exclusively for some years, with PostgreSQL, to build web applications, and over that time I have built a development platform which is, essentially, the distillation of all of those efforts. It has been developed as a platform for other developers, and I want to share it, such as it is, with anyone who wants to build web applications in Php. Jurij Smakov <jurij> I'm a 31-years old postdoctoral researcher, currently working at the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of California Irvine. A major part of my work is development of custom software for computer simulations of physical problems. Early in my graduate studies I've found that open-source software provides all essential tools for that, so I have been using it ever since. [...] So, at the moment there are a few areas I'm actively involved in in Debian. I'm the maintainer of the torrus package, member of the Debian kernel team, and (since Sparc hardware appears to magically accumulate in my vicinity :-) a sparc porter. As there are not too many people actively working on sparc port these days, I'd say that my primary goal in Debian is to keep the sparc port up and running to the best of my abilities. Ben Hutchings <benh> I have been programming since 1983 and started publishing freeware about 10 years later. At that time I was somewhat aware of free software (I had seen RMS in TV documentaries) but I didn't feel able to get involved in it, as I lacked an Internet connection and there didn't seem to much that would run on my computer. Once I bought my first PC in 1997 I installed Red Hat Linux and started making minor changes to it, beginning that day with the addition of my network card's IDs to the appropriate driver. I contributed patches to Linux, PINE (though I realise that's not strictly free), trn and various other programs. A year or so later I had had enough of the Red Hat distribution and switched to Debian. Around the same time I began my professional programming career and in the time since then my programming efforts have mostly been directed towards my work. I have made use of the Boehm garbage collector on two separate projects and my respective employers were happy for me to send changes back, including both bug fixes and new features. However, for the most part I worked on proprietary software. At home, however, I have used Debian almost exclusively since 1998 and have felt that I should be contributing back to it. In the last few years I became socially involved with local Debian developers and users, participated in BSPs, and so became more familiar with Debian packaging and development infrastructure. In 2005 I found a good software project that was surprisingly absent from Debian, and packaged that as sgt-puzzles. I believe I have done a reasonable job of keeping this package up to date and dealing with bug reports relating to it. I attended Debconf 5, which made me very enthusiastic about getting more involved. When I found that there was no plan to compile the video recordings for DC5 onto DVD, I resolved to make this happen, and did so over the next few months, using free software and images, and releasing everything necessary to reproduce my build process. I found some parts of this sufficiently frustrating that I am now working on a new front-end for creating DVD videos (provisionally called WebDVD), which I will propose to include in Debian in due course. I also found and submitted fixes for various bugs in dvdauthor. I will be a member of the video team for this year's conference. While I was at Debconf, Steve McIntyre suggested I do some work on mkisofs and debian-cd to speed up the Debian CD/DVD production process. This is ongoing but some of my changes to mkisofs are already included in the Debian package. Steve also encouraged me to apply to NM. Carlo Segre <segre> I am a Professor of Physics at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). I have been at IIT for 22 years now, starting as an Assistant Professor. My Ph.D. is on Condensed Matter Physics and I have been using computers for various purposes since the early 1970s. I worked as a systems programmer as an undergraduate and I did a lot of assembly language programming for laboratory data acquisition and control systems using the Motorola 6809 processor and the OS/9 operating system, a real time Unix-like system. I have also done a lot of FORTRAN programming including porting and maintaining programs for Crystallographic Structure analysis from VAX to PC and finally to Linux. This is mostly what I do now as far as coding goes. My research centers around using synchrotron x-ray sources for the study of the structures of materials. I also am Deputy Director and operations Manager for the Materials Research Collaborative Access Team (http://mrcat.iit.edu) which is located at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Illinois. The beamline uses a data acquisition and control system, MX (http://mx.iit.edu) that I have been funding the development of for the past 10 years. THis system runs on many platforms but at the MR-CAT beamline, we use mostly Debian Linux machines. My research is now focussing on local structural studies of fuel cell catalysts, corrosion studies of steels, nucleation and growth of crystals of small organic molecules and local structure in multiferroic materials. If you would like to know more about these kinds of things, I will be happy to oblige. I have been using Debian since version 0.99 in 1995 or so. Before that we put Slackware on our departmental Computer Cluster but Debian immediately offered us the ability to upgrade without completely reinstalling everytime and having to write out 50 floppy disks or so. I have been using Debian ever since and I have, at various times been responsible for up to 30 workstations running Debian Linux. More recently, I have been able to have a sysadmin working for the research group. About 2 years ago, I decided that I wanted to make some of the scientific programs that I use available in a form that would be easily redistributable to any of the computers in my research group or the department. This meant that I had to learn to make Debian packages. I have a private repository with a number of these packages in it now. These mostly include programs for x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy data analysis and other programs that we develop in my research group. Faidon Liambotis <paravoid> My name is Faidon Liambotis and I'm 19 years old. I was born and currently live in Athens, Greece. I'm currently studying Computer Science at the Technological University of Athens (http://www.teiath.gr/). I'm also participating as a volunteer to the local wireless community network (Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network/AWMN, http://www.awmn.net/) where I made my first attempts on packaging software for Debian - with the purpose of mass-deploying them to the routers and servers of the network. I'm mostly interested in the development and documentation of network related programs although my work absolutely isn't (and won't be) limited on that. I strongly support the fact that Debian wants to be "Universal Operating System" and that -along with the fact that it's a developed by a community and isn't controlled by a company- are my motivations for getting involved with Debian. My goals are obvious, to help in making Debian a better OS by packaging software for it, reporting and fixing bugs and documenting things while keeping it Free and community-based. Free Ekanayaka <free> I'm undergraduate student in mathematics and I'm currently collaborating with Media Innovation Unit - Firenze Tecnologia [0], a centre dealing, among the others, with research in the audio field, its connections with Free Software. I'm in charge of developing and maintaining the AGNULA/DeMuDi [1] project. All persons employed at Media Innovation Unit have a contract explicitly stating that any work produced is to be licensed as Free Software (typically GPL) or Free Content (typically Creative Commons). [0] http://www.miu-ft.org (sorry English version not available yet) [1] http://www.agnula.org (or http://demudi.alioth.debian.org, in preparation) Rene van Bevern <rvb> I am René van Bevern, born on 16 Nov 1985 in Thuringia, a state in former East Germany. I started using GNU/Linux in August 1998. I happened to become a Debian user with a CD snapshot of the not-yet-released Potato in July 2000. I respect the DFSG and do advocate it publicly. I've also successfully helped one of my upstream authors to choose some more appropriate licenses [1]. I've started programming at the age of 12 using Power Basic and now write (not fluently in all) in C, C++, Objective C, Objective Caml, Ruby, Perl, Pascal, and Common Lisp -- the last one being my favourite language and one of my commitments in Debian. Besides packaging in general, I decided to help making Debian a better place for Common Lisp developers, as already Richard Stallman stated in the GNU manifesto that Lisp besides C shall be the system programming language. We of course know that they are unlikely to reach equal popularity. ;-) I am involved in CL-Debian [2], having some of my own packages [3], helping to fix bugs in the other ones [4] and documenting Common Lisp in Debian (e.g. [5]). Thanks to my sponsors Norbert Tretkowski and Peter Van Eynde, who are always very responsive, I have fun doing work in Debian. Besides programming I started writing articles and news on linux related topics at the age of 13. I also write for printed magazines occasionally. There is not much to tell of me if I leave the topic of computers: I like bicycling a lot, served an intensive care unit in a hostpital (instead of serving the army) and am just starting studying information science. The human languages I know are German, English and Esperanto. [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=311420 [2] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/ [3] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/rvb/ [5] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/clid/clid.html/ Guilherme Pastore <gpastore> I am a Brazilian high school student who has been interested in computers since the age of 4, approximately. I started programming when I was 9 (although I was interested in that before, I had nowhere to get useful information from), but unfortunately did not get to know free software until 3 years later, most likely due to the lack of Internet access, when some comments (which I later found out to be ridiculous FUD spreading) regarding "Linux" systems were published in a magazine and got me interested. ..] What I intend to work on once I have an account is somewhat complicated to list, because I feel eager to help in any area which has problems (e.g. is overloaded). I would probably work harder on the Debian GNOME Team, which is currently lacking manpower, as work will be much more efficient if I do not have to wait for weeks for a sponsor. Also, Debian QA, which has an extremely important and quite complicated and demanding job, in my opinion, and visibly could use some help. Finally, something I hope I will always find time to help with is the sponsorship program, as there are skilled people outside the project who are willing to contribute and have hard times trying to find sponsors for their packages, and the New Maintainer process, which I have been looking at for some years now, and could be improved in a number of ways (although neither trivial nor obvious), mainly by having more Application Managers. Agney Lopes Roth Ferraz <agney> My name is Agney Lopes Roth Ferraz, I live in brazil, I am 23 years old. I am studing computer cience at UNI-BH (www.unibh.br, state of Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte) but I come transferred from computer engeniering at UFES(www.ufes.br). And on my studies I am planning to study next year on New Jersey, Montclair(www.montclair.edu - computer cience). [...] My first contact with free software was in UFES in 1997 when they put linux on laboratories, because the could not pay microsoft license anymore. The boy who installed the lab installed on all computers the Conectiva distribution. But when you try to ask some doubt for him, he used to ignore us. So in a very beatiful day, another guy called alexandre (aka mcgiver) seeing that I was interested in linux called me and offers to help with learning. So he introduce me to debian world. I didn't know, but on laboratories of masters (the title that you try after graduation) he installed debian on all machines, and he was so patient with me and show me everything I want. They borrow me the Debian CD. teach me about apt-get and a lot of stuff. After a time, I used to spend all my free time helping him with the network configuration and security. Two monts after they offers me a job at the laboratories. On this time a learn a lot the debian policy and the philosofy of free software. But didn't stay much time there. six months after the univesity offers me a job on the main datacenter ( I don't know how to say this in english but this datacenter is where they put students history classes and other stuff releated to administration of university). I stay working there still I moved from other state. I used to work there with administration of servers (AIX, Solaris and of course some Debian machines that me and mcgiver install). At this moment I am not working because I am studing english a lot. As I said on december I will move to clifton on new jersey to finish my graduation. My last work was on my university, supporting the network (www.info.unibh.br). I was almost entering the security team, but I have others priorities now. I think that I write too much about me. If you want to know more, ask me what. My interest for Debian is big. First because I think that is the best school for learn about computers. Second because I am so involved with digital inclusion of people who haven't access yet. My local debian group (www.linuxbh.org) make a lot of events to promote debian. We talk about debian, the philosofy, and install debian on machines that users bring for us. We try not only to give access for people who do not have, but give condictions for these people to produce more knowledge. I think that debian project is a good oportunity to really make programs as I like. making the program like as a picture, like as an art. I love the social contract, cause the meaning of it is the kind of idea that I have. It is my life philosofy. I believe that you can do a better word doing what we like to do. I think that the thinking of stallman about apples and ideas is the same that I think. Resuming: i love the debian project, the debian policy and the philosofy of debian. It does not have a why... I love it because I like it. I used debian for a long time (IMO) and now is time to give my contribution to others beginers. Not only becoming a DD. I am in other projects for answer users questions, write docs about applications and show the project for the comunity in general. Miguel Gea Milvaques <xerakko> I'm a Mathematics bachelor and teacher in a Spanish Secondary School. I was researching image and video compression with Discrete Wavelet Transform in 1993 and i needed to create an implementation. After a lot of problems with memory management on MS-DOS, I tried a Slackware Linux with a "new" kernel version 0.99, which solved all my problems. This "free" help got me to release my own application (TutoriaPHP) under the GPL as my first contribution to free software as gratefulness. [...] Within Debian, I'm interested in maintaining my packages and working on new Debian specific packages, specially dbconfig-common. I also want to continue to help in the #debian-mentors-es channel, which is a place to help people to create new packages. I'm sure I'm going to find a lot of new projects on my way. Andree Leidenfrost <andree> I am an IT professional mainly working as an SAP consultant in the areas Basis and Development. Also, I have been doing Linux and Windows administration work for almost a decade and have done programming in various languages over the years including scientific programming in FORTRAN and web development. I'm an expatriate German who has been happily living in Sydney, Australia since the middle of 1999. I believe a world with more OpenSource software would be a slightly better world. My commitment to Debian is my little contribution to making this happen. Ognyan Kulev <ogi> [...] In 1998, I started working in the place I studied (Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics). There I learnt a lot more about Linux, and free software. In the same year, I decided that Debian was my distribution of choice, mainly because it's community-driven effort that expects from its users to somewhat participate in advancing Debian. And it's all devoted to free software! I started to support a Linux account server in my faculty (debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg) and I'm still doing this. [...] As Debian Developer, I will be interested in the advancement of Debian GNU/Hurd. ~ I would like to maintain in Debian my MSc thesis project - ext3fs for the Hurd <http://debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/~ogi/hurd/ext3fs/>. I would like to see Debian GNU/Hurd as part of the next stable Debian release -- Etch. There are other Bulgarian projects that I'm part of or interested in and that need packaging. Torsten Marek <shlomme> I started using various flavours of Linux back in the old millennium, all with varying success and all for a limited time span only, mostly because I could not adapt from several years of using of (err, mostly gaming on) Windows or new hardware broke something in my install. In 2001, I finally switched to SuSE Linux. Having learned to program before (a bit of C, a bit of C++, too much of Visual Basic), I soon started to write my own programs. Eventually, I fell in love with Python, a bond that still holds today. [...] In 2003, after I got used to what Debian does different and becoming an apt-get junkie, I started packaging software (for practice, fun & own usage). In the summer, I first thought about applying at Debian, but several major flamewars in debian-devel made me think whether I really want to put effort and time into Debian. Eventually, I quit reading debian-devel and got back to work. I started packaging eric. As a programmer, I strongly believe in free software - most of my projects would not have been possible without it at all. As a user, I like tuning my own workspace to my personal needs (the much-dreaded freedom *of* choice, not only *from* choice). As for Debian, I like the development model and the architecture of the system, that makes a lot of issues many people have (just one: "Please no external dependencies! External dependencies are bad") complete non-issues. The effort to make nearly every package to behave in a standard-compliant way is, in my eyes, even more important and makes Debian stand out (although I'm not one of the Linuxers that have used some fifty distros and turn back to Windows or Slackware all the time, so I can't impress with experience here). For the near future in Debian (apart from my prepared packages), I'd like to package some more software like nltk, the Natural language toolkit for Python, which combines Python (my hobby) with computational linguistics (my studies) and help out with/create a group for packaging 0install resp. rox & the like. Furthermore, I'm sure to be found where Python is involved, both for packaging and programming new tools. Sven Mueller <sven> I studied computer science from 1992 to 2002 at the university of Dortmund. During that time, I also worked for the department of CS for about two years IIRC (1993-1995). While working there, I was introduced to SunOS, Solaris and Linux system administration. At that time, slackware was about the only usable distribution. While hopping from one system admin job to the other (till Summer 2000), I got to know various Linux distributions (the usual suspects, really: RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE and SLS if anyone remembers that one), but I was never introduced to Debian and the prospect of using a different package manager than the one I was used to (RPM) actually kept me away from it. Well until summer 2002 that is. At that time, I started a new job and had to use Debian. I hated that fact for about a week and than I loved the apt-* and dpkg way of handling packages. Soon I also had to patch a few packages for internal use and really liked the ease of doing so. When I was starting to set up my own new mailserver, I missed a few packages or found ones which were available to be quite outdated, so I adopted them (or created them). Most of them just are a way of installing my own scripts cleanly and keep them in sync across systems, but the ones which have the potential to be useful to others, are now in Debian (spampd and nslint, with cyrus22-imaps following relatively soon). My primary area of interest is certainly the management of servers, mainly mail servers, so that is where I am (and will be) contributing packages. However, I will also try to help other new maintainers to get their packages up to par and hopefully help a few of them to also become DDs. Apart from that and keeping my packages as up to date and bugfree as possible, I can't name any goals at the moment. Erik Schanze <eriks> I'm 31 years old and study computer science in 8th turn. I live in Freital near Dresden in Saxony, Germany. Currently I complete my study by a diploma thesis until end of this year. [snip non-public] Debian has been my favourite distribution for almost 3 years. Before that (since 1998), I tried to use several SuSE versions, but never got it really to work. Looking back I can say I was missing needed hardheadedness. ;-) At the beginning of my study, a new try with SuSE 7.1 was triggered by a donated box from SuSE to all new students and the class "operating systems" held by Prof. Lothar Koch, a Unix and Linux expert. He imparted me the idea of Free Software and started my rapidly growing interesting in Linux and Free Software (and the ideas behind). I got a member of our local Linux User Group (http://lug-dd.schlittermann.de/). In 2002 I switched over Knoppix to Debian, because I was looking for a more open and free distribution than SuSE. (I learned to hate YaST ;-) Around this time Linux became my only OS at home and at university. In 2003 we (some people of our LUG) started our yearly event "Linux-Info-Tag Dresden" (http://www.linux-info-tag.de/) at last weekend in october and we founded the club "Linux-Info-Tag e. V." in 2004 for better organizing. We do this events to propagate the ideas behind Linux and Free Software to the public. We show what we do and explain why we do it. I organize the Debian booth together with Alexander Schmehl every year. In 2003 I started my activities on Debian to give something back to the community that give me this great collection of Free Software. First I read basic documentation like Developers Reference, Debian Policy and New Maintainer Guide. I was impressed by the strict focus on Free Software without any sellout; I like it. Debian makes it esay to contribute in many ways, that encourage me to begin. The german translation of NM-Guide was outdated, so I did a new one. http://www.debian.de/doc/maint-guide/ After that I translated some debconf templates to improove the usibility for Germans. IMO Debian should be widely localized to make it easy for new users. http://people.debian.org/~barbier/intl/l10n/unstable/po-debconf/de I wrote and translate some manpages and tried to provide feedback by good bug reports. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=submitter&data=schanzi_usenet%40gmx.de http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=submitter&data=schanzi_%40gmx.de I'm willing to provide some spare time to Debian to give something back from the great feeling in using this system. "System" means in this context not only the OS, it also include the easy possibility to live the idea of Free Software, to learn much about software handling (like programming, handling of bugs etc.) and working together with other people on the same goal. Debian let me feel, what "community" means, it is nice to be a part of it. I'd like to maintain further packages, do more translations and work on documentation. If I'm more experienced in packaging, I'd like to provide some help on debian-mentors and as a sponsor. Ashley Howes <ashley> I've been using computers for several years, I started with an Amiga in the early 1990s. I've been programming since I went to university. I was introduced to SGI Irix back then whilst working on my Ph.D: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ashley.howes/research/ I then started to experient with Linux, both at home and at work. However, my interest has grown much more over the past 3 years, and through my local LUG (http://www.alug.org.uk), I was introduced to Debian. I enjoyed using it a lot, was encouraged by the idea behind it, and wanted to give something back. I am currently looking after the lavaps package, with my sponsor Daniel Silverstone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> performing the uploads. In Debian I will continue maintaining lavaps, and add/adopt packages which I find useful. As my experience grows, I would also like to get involved in conferences where bugs are fixed, etc. Stuart Teasdale <sdt> My name is Stuart Teasdale, and I've been using Linux since 1996. I started originally using slackware, but changing over to Debian in the summer of 1998, when hamm was released. Since then I've graduated from University and ended up in a career as a unix systems administrator at Oxford University. I use Debian GNU/Linux every day, both at home and at work, and when a package I use extensively in my work, ganglia-monitor, was in need of an update I volunteered to take on the package management from the previous maintainer. In addition, after many years of being a user and consumer of Debian I felt it was time to offer my services back to the project. In the short term I plan to work on packaging, but as I gain experience I'm hoping to get involved in other aspects of the project, including helping with the new-maintainer queue. Qingning Huo <qhuob> I started using Debian in 2001 when I tried to install Linux on an old Sparc box. After a while, it became my major operating platform. At my current job, we develop software on Debian Linux. I like the Debian philosophy and started contributing to Debian since 2004. I adopted log2mail, created a new package for mrxvt (currently waiting in the NEW queue), and just started working on libtorrent. In Debian, I will continue working on these packages, and would like to get involved with other packages and/or jobs too. My special interests are of networking and security. Ricardo Mones <mones> Well, I'm a future computer science engineer, currently finishing his degree. Interested in free and open software since I took contact with it years ago, I've been contributing in my spare (and not so spare) time to some projects, specially the Sylpheed/Sylpheed Claws mailers. Installing Debian to do it was one of my wiser decisions ;-) Lior Kaplan <kaplan> I'm 22 years old, serving in the Israeli Army Air force computing unit while learning to my first degree in Computer Science. About me & Linux / Debian: I encountered Linux around 1997 when learning about the infrastructure of websites as a result of my site building interest. I had since used Linux (mostly on servers). Later on I had a change of trying Debian and "fall in love" with it, and it's base principals (community, DFSG...). I also can't forget apt-get (in the time before everyone got apt4rpm or urpmi). [...] My goals as a DD is the help the Israeli / Hebrew speaking users by: 1. Package needed software, like geresh which is a UTF8 editor with BIDI support. 2. Translate key applications (besides D-I). 3. Advance the BIDI support as part of the I18N efforts. Santiago José Ruano Rincón <santiago> I'm a "serious" gnu/linux user since two years. I'm a co-founder of the Universidad del Cauca GNU/Linux users group. (GLUC, http://gluc.unicauca.edu.co), and part of DebianColombia (http://www.debiancolombia.org). At the moment, I maintain two packages, zaptel and zapata, in the near future, I hope to work in other packages, specially, those related to VoIP or those who I use frequently. I like to bring new people to debian, with a friend, we made a presentation called "El Proyecto Debian GNU/Linux" for the "2º Congreso Suroccidental de Software Libre" the past november. I hope to make more presentations like that. Alexander Schmehl <tolimar> I don't know exactly, when I first got in contact with Linux. It must be somewhere between the release of bo (1997) and hamm (1998) I think. However: It was a quiete easy story. In those days some friends ane me played often network games. Since our favourite game "CivNet" crashed very often, it wasn't that funny it could be. One of this friend told me about an civilization clone which would need to install something called "Linux". (Yes: I first installed Linux to play freeciv.) My fist distribution was Red Hat, installed by that friend. One week later I forced him to install Debian (I think it was "bo"), since he changed to Debian GNU/Linux and refused to answer my questions about "that stinky piece of crab which tries to hide behind an expensive cap". Two weeks later I learned that it is highly insecure to run gpm, when you work mostly as root. Especially if you suddenly paste something like "rm -rf /". Since my friend warned me, to not work as root and I know how creative he can be when inventing new taunts, I decided to solve this problem without him, and installed Debian for my first time with three weeks of Linux experience. The next two weeks I didn't touched the System anymore, to recover from that trauma. But I got curious, who does all that work, and why and how. I found out about Free Software, DFSG and what the difference betwenn »free« and »free«, and between »project« and a »company« is. Later I learned to value the possibiltie to fit the system to your needs, and when I killed my Windows installation a couple of month later, I didn't care much about it. So I was a very convenient Debian GNU/Linux User for a while... well... for a couple of years. I learned, and startet to help other people via irc and mailing lists. Sometimes I submitted a bug report, but I didn't did much to pay the communitie back, what I got. I think it was 2001 or maybe 2002, when I noticed, that you where searching for volunteers to man the booth at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, and I joined the team. It was quite funny, I learned a lot, and this was the beginning of my career as the one, who is sometimes called »Debian Conference and Booth Manager for the German speaking area«. I travelled to quite some exhibitions, road shows and conferences to repesent the Debian Project with running boothes and talking about Debian. Sadly I didn't had time to write reports about all of them. Somewhere between that I started some translations to german, some package descriptions, and later the security howto (of which I must conceed, that my translation is quite outdated at the moment). All the times I frequently met people, who suggested to start NM-process. But since I was quite busy the last years, I didn't liked the idea, that I might be unable to react on bugreports / questions / whatever in a reasonable time. Since I have more time, I think it's time to pay something back. My first package allready got accepted to the debian archive (tuxracer-extras, adopted from Andreas Tille who is my sponsor and advocat, too). Looking at the wnpp list, there are some packages, I whish to take a look at (e.g. the orphaned xfce4 plugins). In any case I will continue to travell to exhibitons and conferences to represent Debian, allthough it is often very stressfull, it is allways funny. Once someone in our Linux User Group said to me, that I can explain quite good, I should write a book. Since that I plan to write some kind of "newbie guide to debian including some understandable explanations how all that computer thingies work) or something similar (of course in my native language - you allready discovered that my english is not as good as it could be). And finally a little bit about me personly: Born 1978 in Frankfurt / Germany, three sisters, started playing ... hmm ... using computers with four (an old sinclait QL, which is still somewhere in my fathers cellar). Now student of Computer Sciences (subsidiary subjects philosphy) at the university of Frankfurt, member of different administration boards at the university. Morten Werner Olsen <werner> I am 24 years old, and is about to finish my master degree in Computer Science within the field of System Administration. I started playing with Linux on my home network about 7 years ago, but it was in the beginning of my Computer Science education that I started using GNU/Linux for as many task as possible. The reason for doing this, was that I think I learned more from using GNU/Linux and Free Software than the properitary alternatives. I also try to report bugs I find, and if I am capable with patches, so the software can be even better. My first experience with Debian was when I started administrating a Linux server for a studentgroup which I was member. After a few days with APT-experience it was no return.. :) I've been doing the last two years of my education in Trondheim, Norway, and at a meeting in a local Skolelinux group my interest for Skolelinux started. But it was at the Skolelinux developer gathering last summer (the same time and place as Debconf) I was introduced to the other developers and started helping out with the development. During the fall 2003 I made slbackup[1] as my student project, and since January this year, I have been maintaining it in Debian. This spring I have improved and maintained the xdebconfigurator package, packaged and maintained hwinfo[2] and started the Skolelinux security team which will patch and release new packages of the software we use that is not a part of Debian stable and forward DSA's from Debian for packages we think will affect the users of Skolelinux. I will finish my master theses before 1. July, and hope to find a job before that (hopefully a job where I can work with and perhaps contribute to Debian and Free Software). The reason I want to join Debian is that Debian has for the last years been the distribution of my heart, and I want to help making it even better! And as a Skolelinux Developer I think I can help Skolelinux to reach their goal of fully integrating with Debian (as Debian-Edu) better as a Debian Developer. The work I will do for Debian the next months, years or something is package management and testing/debugging. Later, if needed, I would be happy to help maintaining the infrastructure. I spend my (spare)time with supporting and developing Free Software because I hope that what I do will be useful for others, just as I benefit from a lot of work already done by others. And I really think the "create and share" philosophy is great, and is far from enough used in other parts of our society. Enrico Tassi <gareuselesinge> I've first used a GNU/Linux system at the university of Bologna, six years ago. Here there are a lot of students (and some teachers) interested in Free Software and GNU/Linux, and I've been "captured" by this world. I want to volunteer my time for two reasons. First I believe in Free Software and helping a free operating system distribution is something I'll be proud of. The second reason is that I use Debian every day, and I would like to help this awesome distribution. Actually I've not done so much for Debian. I've built some packages libcurl-ocaml, libexpat-ocaml, and freepops. The first has been accepted by and ftp manager, while the others are still in the NEW queue. As an author of freepops (http://freepops.org) I've created and maintained an unofficial deb for many months. I'm an author of some other stuff, and I've packaged them too, but I don't think they are ready to enter Debian and I've not proposed my sponsor to check and upload them. If you are interested this is the unofficial pool of my deb: http://tassi.web.cs.unibo.it I've no precise goal, I think I'll help the people of debian-ocaml-maint mailing list in maintaining the ocaml language branch. Daigo Moriwaki <daigo> I learned Java several years ago and was excited by programming with Free Software and their communities --- I am much interested in Ruby now. I used to use RedHat, but I found that Debian is most useful platform for such programming because its policy and vast well-defined packages. However, there are applications and libraries which are not debianized so I'd like to make Debian more useful for users and myself and have built some packages. Now I need to maintain them and make more packages. But packaging with help of sponsors is getting a burden for us. It is good chance to become official developer and be able to maintain packages more quickly and skillfully. Oleksandr Moskalenko <malex> I plan to primarily package Scribus and related documents, materials and software plus a number of packages I plan to pick up from the pool of those that have been orphaned and are not actively sought by other maintainers. In addition, I plan to at least contribute to bug fixing and translation of documentation and UI into Ukrainian. Troy Heber <troyh> I'm just a regular guy enjoying life. I have a wife and two young kids. I got into computers at a very young age. I started BBSing back in the 300 baud days. Eventually, I started a BBS of my own. As a sysop I became part of the local community of computer geeks. Eventually BBS's turned into the Internet, and in the early 90's I discovered Linux. I remember hanging out at a friends house for a few days trying to download all of the slackware disks off a very slow slip connection, then transferring it to all of those free AOL floppies. After managing to get Linux installed, I quickly realized there wasn't much I could do with it, I'm pretty sure this was even before slackware hit 1.0. So after a little stint with OS/2 and Windows, I came back to Linux. I became a RHCE in 99, and was very happy with Red Hat until they abandoned the free software community. This lead to look for a new distribution and I found Debian. I have a BS in computer science and I'm employed by Hewlett Packard in their Linux & Open Source R&D lab. So I'm very lucky that I get to work on free software at work and home. I want to volunteer my time to Debian because I love free software and I want to get more involved. Juergen Salk <jsa> I've been working with unixoid systems since 1991. Started with AIX during my particle physics research work at CERN. Switched over to HP-UX and Sun-OS in 1994 when I changed to medical physics in radiation oncology. In 1997 I've installed Linux on my personal computer to have a similar working environment at home for a research project. In all honesty, I didn't expect too much from it at this time, but finally found myself deeply impressed by the quality and quantity of software that I came across. In the aftermath of that, more and more of my applications migrated to Linux, both at home and at work. And the more I got engaged in the ideas of free software, the more I felt obliged to give something back to the community. I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively, as I appreciate its general "openness", i.e. its high degree of transparency in how it evolves. However, I am somewhat frustrated by its weak degree of awareness and spreading in the medical physics world. In 2003 I was able to convince the leader of the DGMP [1] working group 'Computers in Radiooncology' to have the annual meeting devoted to the benefits of free software in healthcare. As I took a modest part in the organization of this meeting, I also invited the maintainer of Debian-Med to give a talk about his project. Shortly after that, a discussion came up on the debian-med mailinglist about making an official package of the DCMTK DICOM toolkit[2,3]. I soon became involved and finally took a substantial part in packaging DCMTK for Debian. My plans are to keep on working on the DCMTK packages. I'd like to support Debian as a working environment in general by helping to improve the quality of the current packages and by identifying useful software projects especially for medical physicists. [1] http://www.dgmp.de [2] http://dicom.offis.de/dcmtk [3] http://packages.debian.org/testing/source/dcmtk Michael Ablassmeier <abi> I'm a 20 Year old system administrator in one of germany's biggest insurance companies. During my education, i got more and more interested in Linux and the free Software (and OpenSource) movement in general. I began using SuSE Linux around 2000. After several months, i did my first Debian installation. Noadays, i use Debian in my Home environment aswell as at work and after so much years, i felt like giving something back would be great, so i began maintaining my first Debian Package in April 2003. At the moment my primary interest in Debian is, to keep my packages in good shape. I enjoy meetings with the Munich Debian crowd from time to time and have been a helper at the Systems Booth 2004. Recai Oktas <roktas> I am a research assistant at Electrics-Electronics Engineering Department of Ondokuz Mayis University of Turkey, specializing in "Design Methodologies for Analog Integrated Circuits". I've been studying on my Ph.D. thesis for a time. Debian has been my favourite distribution for almost two years. Before that (since 1995), I used to use Slackware and some RedHat based distributions. There are a number of issues which motivated me for the transition. Naming a few, consistency (resulting from `Debian Policy'), freedom awareness of DFSG and totally open and transparent development model. (Well, As the answer of "Why Debian?", I would also like to mention the short but impressive text of Adam Heath [1], which I whole heartly agree.) As an active member of `debian-user-turkish' and `debian-l10n-turkish' lists, my main concern is to provide an almost flawless working environment for Turkish users of Debian. As part of my already stated plans to reach this goal [2], I'm currently working on a Turkish localization script suite which I intend to package as `user-tr'. There exist some published articles [3a-b] and a mini-HOWTO [4] which could be considered as the pre-efforts for this project. Being a member of debian-l10n-turkish team, I also participate in the translation activities of Debian documentation and web pages (including the highly critical job of achieving an accurate translation of `Debian Social Contract' [5] which we've hopefully succeeded after a few discussion in the mail list.) [...] [1] http://www.linuxsolutions.com.br/debian-br/porque_debian/why-debian_me.txt [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-turkish/2003/debian-user-turkish/msg00042.html [3a] http://www.fazlamesai.net/modules.php?name=3DNews&file=3Darticle&sid=1007 (Woody review in Turkish) [3b] http://www.fazlamesai.net/modules.php?name=3DNews&file=3Darticle&sid=1079 (Debian Turkish support) [4] http://www.fazlamesai.net/modules.php?name=3DNews&file=3Darticle&sid=1693 (Debian Turkish mini-HOWTO) [5] http://www.debian.org/social_contract.tr.html Tatsuya Kinoshita <tats> I'm 31 years old and living in Osaka, Japan. [...] In 1999, I met a free Emacsen mailer "Mew". Mew was implemented by Emacs Lisp (mew/*.el) and Perl utilities (IM: im* commands and backend Perl modules). For bug fixes and improvements of Mew, I learned Emacs Lisp. Mew developing team quited maintaining IM, and then I took over a maintainer of IM officially. I released IM version 142 and later versions. (Mew version 2 and later versions are independent of IM.) I used operating systems, Microsoft Windows + BOW (BSD on Windows), Slackware, and Plamo Linux, and then I met a free operating system "Debian GNU/Linux". Debian is now my preferred operating system. On October, 2002, I took over a maintainer of Debian official package "mule-ucs". (Then I became one of upstream developers (CVS committers) of mule-ucs.) -- adn Mohammed Adnène Trojette -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]