| A conversation with Anthony Towns |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 20 September 2006 | |
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Page 4 of 4
Towns has been part of the Debian project for nearly nine years. He's not sure of the direction which the project will take next but finds it "absolutely amazing how quickly Ubuntu's efforts have spread Debian to a whole new group of people, and I expect the future will bring similarly fascinating changes that I never would have believed."He and four other senior developers set up a project called Dunc a couple of days back, something separate from Debian, to raise funds so that people working on Debian could be paid. "As you might guess from my involvement in the Dunc-Tank announcement, I'm personally interested in finding ways to make working on free software be an easy decision to make - we already know it's an efficient way to create software, and a fun thing to do, so the only real challenge is making it just as easy to support yourself as it currently is working on non-free software." Towns sees bigger changes happening in other areas. "Debian has a very strong emphasis on internationalisation, and supporting users and contributors in every part of the globe. We've seen earlier this year how easily Bhutan bootstrapped DzongkhaLinux, a version of Debian customised for the local language - as China and India improve their information technology, where Microsoft sees the potential for billions of dollars in licensing fees, we see the possibility for billions of new contributors; and to me that's a lot more exciting than any amount of money." Strange but true - one more young man who isn't fascinated by the almighty dollar. For him, code seems to do it.{moscomment} |
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