TAG | A conversation with Martin Michlmayr |
|
| by Sam Varghese | |
| Thursday, 31 January 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 6   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
It is impossible to speak to him without realising that one is in the presence of a scholar. One is also left wondering why a mild-mannered academic type like him continues to stay in the rough and tumble world of free software. But after a while it becomes evident that Michlmayr is there because he cares deeply about the direction FOSS is taking. And he wants to do something about it, to make things go in what he considers the right direction. After completing a doctorate at Cambridge University, on quality management in free software projects, with an emphasis on release management, Michlmayr, who is originally from Austria, recently joined HP's Open Source and Linux Organisation as an open source community expert. He spoke to iTWire on the sidelines of the Australian national Linux conference . iTWire: How did you come to be in the world of free software in the first place? Martin Michlmayr: It was actually quite a long time ago. I was interested in user interfaces and NextStep was very advanced back in those days. There were some people trying to implement the NextStep user interface in Linux. I became interested in that and I got involved. One of the problems was that new people found it very hard to get started, because there wasn't any documentation and people didn't know where to begin. So after I worked with the software and figured out how most of the things worked, I put together a FAQ and a small website, and that's the way I first got involved. Later I also helped to co-ordinate with volunteers who were interested in participating in the project, to see how they could help. So I was using that software, I was running Linux. I think this was in '94 when I was around 14. I looked at your website , and some of the stuff you've done is absolutely amazing. But very few people seem to know about you. My dad is a teacher, and at some point he thought he had to get a PC, so he had to learn about it and then teach, but he never did very much with it. But my brother and I, we used it quite a bit. I have an older brother, he knew a few things - that was back in the days of DOS. We did some Pascal programming, and then at some point he took me to the university, where we downloaded some Pascal source code using FTP. At some point he got me a UNIX machine, so that's how later I got involved with the free software community. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
