This is a summary of the AM report for Week Ending 02 Jan 2005. 8 applicants became maintainers.
Don Armstrong <don> "I am currently a graduate student in the Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology program at UC Riverside. I primarily work on lipid membranes and membrane microdomains (so called lipid rafts). I also work with gene microarrays, most recently examining the effect of Alzheimer's disease on brain primary cell cultures of individuals who have died with the disease. In my research, I use alot of free software tools, like R, bioperl, etc. and I have written alot of glue in perl to tie everything together. Free Software tools aree almost an imperative, because it often becomes necessary to modify tools and/or check the validity of results from tools, which is something that is fairly impossible with proprietary tools. Because so many of these tools are usefull to my research, it's quite important for me to spend whatever time is necessary to make sure that these tools keep working, and stay free. As far as Debian is concerned, I have been working on maintaing a few packages which are usefull for my research and/or for my hobbies, and supporting the maintainers of packages that I use but don't maintain. My other major work is helping to interpret licenses and answer questions regarding the DFSG on debian-legal. Currently, I am working with the GFDL committee to work on a DFSG free GFDL, and I will shortly be getting involved in the 2.0 Apache License discussions as well. My work (and others work) in this area will hopefully enable Debian to work with the FSF and ASF to get licenses that are DFSG Free so works under these licenses can stay in Debian. I came to the Free Software world and GNU/Linux in general in 1997 as I started college, after spending a considerable amount of time in the Macintosh Shareware/Freeware community. After being able to fix a few of the system administration problems I had by simply modifying code and submitting a patch upstream [at the time I was administering a 2 thousand node network] I was sold on GNU/Linux, and later on in 1998 switched from RedHat to Debian." Bartosz Fenski <fenio> "I am a co-founder and a coordinator of Polish Debian Documentation Project. Our aim is to translate into Polish the documentation being provided by Debian GNU/Linux system and we have been also translating official Debian web pages. So as you can see I am doing something for Debian right now but I would like to do more. Official pages of our project: http://debian.linux.org.pl/en/"; Samuel Mimram <smimram> "I'm a french student in computer science at the ENS Lyon in France. I came to linux thanks to friends and now I only use it. I try to administrate mine as well as possible and I installed a few linux for friends or family. I think open source software is the only form of software which is going to last because it has so many advantages (transparency, bugs quickly corrected, features can easily be added, you have a control on your data since its format is public, etc) including for companies. That's why I want to help free software. And since I think Debian is a very good distribution (very serious, good packaging system) I decided to become a DD. For Debian I intent to maintain some packages, especialy concerning the OCaml programming language which is a wonderful not-well-known functionnal programming language (the debian-ocaml-maint team told me they did not have time to maintain as many packages as they would like to). But more generally, if I find programs useful for me and there is no equivalent program in the official Debian distribution, I think I'll package them." Roland Marcus Rutschmann <rudi> "I started with SuSE about 1996/97 slowly switching over from OS2 with the use of XFreeOS/2. I thought about other Distributions at the time, never getting the time to deal with them. In between University jobs I applied at SuSE and got turned down, so I really took a look into debian ;-) (Maybe childish but it was the right move anyway). I am in charge of the Linux-computers here in our Institute. When a programm that I really needed was not available in debian, I started to debianize it. That was quite a while and some versions ago. It's now in testing. Other than that, I gave some helpful (and probably some stupid) bug reports. My University group will switch to the University of Regensburg, which has it's own debian based distribution. So I hope to be helpful there as well." Andres Salomon <dilinger> "There are numerous things I want to do for Debian; first and foremost, maintaining my packages to the best of my abilities. I'd also like to help w/ the structure of Debian (Enterprise Debian and improving testing are two things that I'm itching to do; free time permitting). And, of course, I'm always finding other packages are lacking, and I end up helping out with those. This, and the previous paragraph cover points #2 and 4 of the Social Contract; improving packages and usability for users, and contributing back to the (free software) community. I volunteer my time doing Debian related stuff because I used Debian, both at home and at work. The more Debian improves, the less stressful my life becomes." Thiemo Seufer <ths> "Well, I started to use Linux years ago (with 0.99.pl13) because I wnated to write a program larger than 640k. Linux was free (as in beer), it allowed to use the whole 4MB of my system and had also a free compiler. It took some more years until I started to help with the development of free (as in speech) software, this came when I found interest in the MIPS achitecture. In course of that, I became upstream maintainer of MIPS binutils, and contribute patches for kernel/toolchain/glibc when the bugs get to annoying. I also took over the delo (DEcstation boot LOader) upstream and improved it substantially. For Debian, I'm primarily interested in the mips/mipsel ports, where Debian is IMHO the most viable distribution. To improve it, I started to help the debian-installer effort, concentrating on the mips port. It is now in a nearly-releasable state, but lacks daily built test image and a few other things which need to be done by a DD." Geert Stappers <stappers> Geert writes, "Somewhere 1993 a computer club was building an 68000 successor for there 6502 systems. Linux was used for the (cross)development. Having the various GNU tools was great. First I could not imaginate how free(gratis to me in those days) software could exist. I thought GPL was about "NO WARRANTY". After several years I realized that GPL is freedom. Free Software is how people should work/live together." Geert has various Debian related plans and ideas. At the moment, he mostly focuses on his package conglomerate and on working on debian-installer. Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen> "I'm a 22 year old Computer Science student in Utrecht, The Netherlands. I have been active in Debian for about a year now, in various areas: packages (lintian, phpbb2), QA work (overview pages, MIA) and release work. As a Debian user since about 4 years, I hope to be useful for Debian as a developer with broad interests." -- Martin Michlmayr http://www.cyrius.com/
