ITWire

Raster said the very first version of DeVeDe took about two or three weeks, but it was very simple. He released it on January 14, 2006.

"It didn't allow subtitles, menus... All those other options were added during several months. It also was quite a mess internally, because it was my second program in Python, my first big project in that language, and I wrote it quite fast.

"I also made some refactoring work at several stages to be able to keep it growing. This was a must because some people was sending patches to me to add some new options, like Peter Gill, who made it work with Windows. I usually work alone, but accept patches from other people."

He says all the programs he writes in his spare time are distributed mainly under the GPL licence (originally, version 2; now version 3). "The reason is because I think it's a licence which gives a good balance of rights and responsibilities to the receiver of the code, allowing other people to enhance the programs, but not to take control of them. I think that collaborative work always gives better results than reinventing the wheel over and over again."

Though he has always done it as a hobby, "obviously they helped because thanks to them I practised several techniques and skills that I needed, and learned a lot of things that were useful later. They also helped me to find a job (or so says my boss). "

Asked if he had ever considered making his programs proprietary and selling them, Raster modestly replied: "No, I don't think so. My programs are quite small, I don't think people would pay for them. Also, doing that would add pressure to this (you know: if people pays, they have right to demand things). For me, this is a hobby."

He said that he currently had no new ideas in mind, only bugfixes and little new capabilities for the current ones (mainly DeVeDe and Cronopete, the latter a clone of Apple's Time Machine for Linux). "But if tomorrow I find myself with an unresolved problem, probably I'll create a new program to solve it."

Raster currently uses Ubuntu, "mainly to use the same distribution as the majority of my users. Unfortunately, recently Canonical has been doing some things that I dislike (mainly the Unity desktop, the bloated daemons, and removing the word 'Linux' in everything), so now I'm evaluating to return to Debian, or use another Debian-based distribution like Aptosid."