A humble request for help

[Stefan Görling]

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently working on a thesis investigating how Open Source is affected by the influence of money and the interests of commercial companies. As the SAMBA Server efforts is the foundation of many companies it is interesting to study how their entrance to the scene have affected the community.

The thesis as well as research papers surrounding it will be released under the GNU Free Documentation License and as soon as the first drafts are available they will be published so that the community may comment upon it.

In order to improve the research, it would be great if you guys could spend a few minutes on this one. I have included below a list of the most active persons on this mailinglist during the year 2002. I have tried to establish their employer as far as e-mail adresses and google could help me out, but there are lots of unknowns, and probably some errors too. So please, send me patches.

Also, if you belive that there are others who should be on this list, or someone who shouldn't please let me know. I'm missing Andrew Tridgell from this list, anybody who can tell me why?

If there are someone out there who would be willing to answer some more detailed questions, such as how long they've been doing Open Source development as a source of income and how they think it have affected them and their efforts, please drop me a line. I'd be forever grateful. I am also very interested in interviewing developers who are major contributors on their free-time.

Andrew Bartlett,Unknown / Self-financed
Gerald Carter,VA Linux
Richard Sharpe,Pansas
Jeremy Allison,VA Linux
Simo Sorce,Xsec
Stefan Metzmacher,Unknown / Self-financed
Tim Potter,VA Linux
Christopher R. Hertel,Unknown / Self-financed
Jelmer Vernooij,Unknown / Self-financed
Steve Langasek,Unknown / Self-financed
Andrew Esh,TriCord ?
David Collier-Brown,SUN Microsystems
Volker Lendecke,Service Network GmbH
Rafal Szczesniak,Unknown / Self-financed
Jim McDonough,IBM
Alexander Bokovoy,Sam-Solutions
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton,Unknown / Self-financed
Bradley W. Langhorst,Unknown / Self-financed
Don McCall,HP
Ulf Bertilsson,Unknown / Self-financed
Urban Widmark,Enlight
Mike Gerdts,Alcatel
Luke Howard,PADL Software Pty Ltd
David Lee,University of Durham
Juergen Hasch,Unknown / Self-financed
Steven French,IBM
Andreas Moroder,Unknown / Self-financed

Best Regards,

Stefan Görling