Debian made this developer unhappy

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 07 February 2008 19:37

Opinion and Analysis

It's normal to build up a mental picture of a person based on what you know about them, especially if you plan to meet that person. At times, the image is not too far removed from reality. At others, the mental image and reality could not be more different.
One look at Matthew Garrett and you start wondering: is this the guy who caused such a big furore in the FOSS community in September 2006 when he made plain his reasons for leaving the Debian GNU/Linux project after four years as a developer?

Anyone who followed that episode, would have put down Garrett as a troublemaker, arrogant and somewhat prone to narcissism. The reality could not be more different.

At 28, Garrett is a little over average height but his height is accentuated by his slimnesss. Dressed in black, he looks very much the nerdy kid, certainly not an academic who's just completed his doctorate on the genetics of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).

He has been working on laptop and power management support in Linux for the past four or five years and getting increasingly involved in power management functionality. He's unemployed at the moment but that is unlikely to last for long given the intensity, intelligence and integrity he will obviously bring to any job he undertakes.

Unlike many FOSS people, he is unfailingly polite - it's difficult to imagine him spewing flames on a mailing list though he admits he has - and very British in his use of the language. He's also not someone whom you could describe as being full of himself. I had a chat with him soon after he made a presentation to the recent Linux conference held in Melbourne.

Let's go back a bit in time. Tell me a little bit about yourself - what were you like as a little boy? What were your interests?

I actually got an early start on computers unlike many people my age in the UK. My dad bought a Commodore 64 when I was three. I started learning early, some amount of BASIC code. During my pre-school I was living in a rural area (in Northern Ireland) and there was not much to do apart from fiddling with computers. I got my first exposure to NetBSD when I was 15.

But I didn't really get into Linux until I went to university and started coding there. I started doing maths which turned out to be an error. I was fortunate in that I ended up working with a large number of people who are also interested in Linux and since interaction was more face to face than online, I had lots of opportunities to learn how various things work, how to get useful things done.