Search Results: "Joel Klecker"

22 June 2016

Andrew Cater: Why I must use Free Software - and why I tell others to do so

My work colleagues know me well as a Free/Libre software zealot, constantly pointing out to them how people should behave, how FLOSS software trumps commercial software and how this is the only way forward. This for the last 20 odd years. It's a strain to argue this repeatedly: at various times, I have been asked to set out more clearly why I use FLOSS, what the advantages are, why and how to contribute to FLOSS software.

"We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here
...
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish."
[John Perry Barlow - Declaration of the independence of cyberspace 1996 https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence]

That's some of it right there: I was seduced by a modem and the opportunities it gave. I've lived in this world since 1994, come to appreciate it and never really had the occasion to regret it.

I'm involved in the Debian community - which is very much a "do-ocracy" - and I've lived with Debian GNU Linux since 1995 and not had much cause to regret that either, though I do regret that force of circumstance has meant that I can't contribute as much as I'd like. Pretty much every machine I touch ends up running Debian, one way or the other, or should do if I had my way.
Digging through my emails since then on the various mailing lists - some of them are deeply technical, though fewer these days: some are Debian political: most are trying to help people with problems / report successes or, occasionally thanks and social chit chat. Most people in the project have never met me - though that's not unusual in an organisation with a thousand developers spread worldwide - and so the occasional chance to talk to people in real life is invaluable.

The crucial thing is that there is common purpose and common intelligence - however crazy mailing list flame wars can get sometimes - and committed, caring people. Some of us may be crazy zealots, some picky and argumentative - Debian is what we have in common, pretty much.

It doesn't depend on physical ability. Espy (Joel Klecker) was one of our best and brightest until his death at age 21: almost nobody knew he was dying until after his death. My own physical limitations are pretty much irrelevant provided I can type.

It does depend on collaboration and the strange, dysfunctional family that is our community and the wider FLOSS community in which we share and in which some of us have multiple identities in working with different projects.
This is going to end up too long for Planet Debian - I'll end this post here and then continue with some points on how to contribute and why employers should let their employers work on FLOSS.




17 August 2013

Andrew Cater: Debian - 20th birthday

Happy Birthday! Second oldest Linux distribution still going - Slackware is a little older. It's also been the bane of my life / my obsession / fixation and joy for about 15 of those years. I'm pleased and proud to be associated with the Debian Project as a Debian developer: many of my colleagues are at Debconf 13 in Vaumarcus in Switzerland right now but there will be celebrations around the world.

Great distribution: great hardware support on lots of architectures: huge numbers of derivatives - but what makes it is the people, including some of those who have contributed hugely but are sadly no longer with us. Debian is a phenomenal, supportive, family but, as ever, sometimes dysfunctional

Joel Klecker, Chris Rutter, Frans Pop, Adrian von Bidder and all the others - I so wish you'd all been here to see this.

13 March 2011

Lars Wirzenius: DPL elections: candidate counts

Out of curiosity, and because it is Sunday morning and I have a cold and can't get my brain to do anything tricky, I counted the number of candidates in each year's DPL elections.
Year Count Names
1999 4 Joseph Carter, Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Richard Braakman
2000 4 Ben Collins, Wichert Akkerman, Joel Klecker, Matthew Vernon
2001 4 Branden Robinson, Anand Kumria, Ben Collins, Bdale Garbee
2002 3 Branden Robinson, Rapha l Hertzog, Bdale Garbee
2003 4 Moshe Zadka, Bdale Garbee, Branden Robinson, Martin Michlmayr
2004 3 Martin Michlmayr, Gergely Nagy, Branden Robinson
2005 6 Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei, Angus Lees, Anthony Towns, Jonathan Walther, Branden Robinson
2006 7 Jeroen van Wolffelaar, Ari Pollak, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Towns, Andreas Schuldei, Jonathan (Ted) Walther, Bill Allombert
2007 8 Wouter Verhelst, Aigars Mahinovs, Gustavo Franco, Sam Hocevar, Steve McIntyre, Rapha l Hertzog, Anthony Towns, Simon Richter
2008 3 Marc Brockschmidt, Rapha l Hertzog, Steve McIntyre
2009 2 Stefano Zacchiroli, Steve McIntyre
2010 4 Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy, Margarita Manterola
2011 1 Stefano Zacchiroli (no vote yet)
Winner indicate by boldface. I expect Zack to win over "None Of The Above", so I went ahead and boldfaced him already, even if there has not been a vote for this year. Median number of candidates is 4.

5 April 2006

Clint Adams: Dis ingenuity and dat ingenuity

Matthew, are you suggesting that all the heated discussions and flamewars about how to respond to the deaths of developers didn't happen, or that they were caused by three insane weirdos who are technically part of the community we love so much more than Ubuntu, yet not reeeeeally part of the community? Do you recall discourse about certain actions potentially cheapening our honoring of the memory of Joel Klecker? Which position then fell in the realm of this common sense to which we should aspire?