Ted Gould is an open source developer working on desktop and usability on Ubuntu for Canonical. He’s also an active developer on the Inkscape project and enjoys photography. He lives in LA with his wife and son.

SCALE: Ted, tell us a bit about yourself. We know you work on Ubuntu, for Canonical, and you’re a developer on the Inkscape project.

Ted: And I use vi. I’m not sure if such a divisive question should start the interview

I’ve been an Open Source developer for a while, working on Sodipodi and GNOME before Inkscape started. Recently I got a job at Canonical which allows me to spend time doing more mainstream GNOME development.
Inkscape is a GTK+ program, thus using several GNOME technologies, but isn’t in GNOME proper. I’ve never lost my GNOME roots, remaining a member of the foundation and on e-mail lists but now I have more time to act.

I’m really enjoying working in Open Source. There are so many less secrets and things that “we don’t tell customers.” Sure, they know, but we couldn’t tell them, right? It’s frustrating for developers not being able to have an honest conversation and solve problems for people. I feel like I help more people when working in the open.

SCALE: Describe your typical day - how much is Ubuntu work and how much is Inkscape work? Do they overlap at all?

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SCALE interviewed Debian developer, Don Armstrong following SCALE. He was kind enough to answer question about his favorite Linux distribution as well as open source in general.

SCALE: Gareth J. Greenaway, SCALE Community Relations
Don: Don Armstrong, Debian

SCALE: Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Don: My name is Don Armstrong; I’m currently a graduate student in the Cell, Molecular, and Developmental Biology program at UC Riverside, where I study lipid membranes and lupus using Debian (and other Free Software tools.)

SCALE: How did you get involved in Open Source software?

Don: I started using Free Software in 1997 or thereabouts (though I had been using some bits of the GNU toolkit and perl earlier). At first I started because I was doing more work programming and was tired of having to deal with problems that I had to work around instead of resolve completely. By around 1999 I was using Free Software almost exclusively, and have been almost continuously since then.

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SCALE chatted with Ted Haeger, formerly of Novell, now at Bungee Labs. In the interview, Ted talks about Bungee’s business model, and what his role in Bungee is. The interview is here.

SCALE is in its third day. For the most part it’s gone exceedingly well, with only minor glitches.

Some good points:

The redesigned registration system, while showing the rough edges of a new application, worked exceedingly well. We had just as many people show up yesterday and today as last year, but the lines at registration trailing clear back to the hotel entrance never occurred. The faster registration process plus a half dozen self-check in kiosks prevent the wait from ever being longer than a few minutes. Kudos to Lei Zhang for the redesign!

There were only the usual couple of defective cables in the SCALE network; the Internet link (4 bonded DSL lines) and the LAN (100 VLANs!) came up with only a bit of debugging by Stu’s Tech Committee, and has stayed up since. Props to Stu, Mike Maki, and the rest of the Tech Commitee volunteers!

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On the eve of the 6th Annual So Cal Linux Expo, Jono Bacon of Canonical was kind enough to grant SCALE an interview.   Orv Beach of the Linux Expo sat down with Jono and discussed a variety of topics.  The interview, recorded on this device, is here.

Jono will give the opening day keynote at SCALE, entitled “Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: The Coming Of The Linux Desktop”

SCALE interviewed two PostgreSQL developers, Joshua D. Drake and Josh Berkus on the eve of PostgreSQL appearing at SCALE. They were kind enough to answer question about their favorite database.

SCALE: Gareth Greenaway, SCALE Community Relations
JD: Joshua D. Drake
JB: Josh Berkus

SCALE: What role do you play in the PostgreSQL community? In the development of PostgreSQL?
JD: I am the PostgreSQL SPI Liaison. The majority of my focus is within fundraising and advocacy. However, I also contribute to docs and the website. Command Prompt, Inc (my employer) is also one of the most pervasive contributors to the PostgreSQL community.
JB: I’m on the PostgreSQL core team, which is a kind of “steering committee” for the project. Mainly we set the dates for releases, and provide leadership on the rare occasions when consensus doesn’t work. I mainly do PR for the project, public speaking, and benchmarks.

SCALE: What do you think is the single most important feature from the 8.3 release? What feature are you most proud of?

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SCALE: Ilan Rabinovitch: SCALE Chair
HP: Bob Gobeille, Hewlett Packard Open Source & Linux Organization FOSSology lead developer

SCALE: HP participates in a number of community run Linux and open source conferences such as SCALE, Ohio Linux Fest, Linu.conf.au, etc. How do these community events fit into HP’s strategy when compared to more commercial Linux / open-source conferences?

HP: We feel that events like SCALE are an excellent way to demonstrate how important the community is to us. It’s also a way to show how HP participates in the evolution of open source. We haven’t forgotten that if it wasn’t for “community”, Linux and open-source would not be what it is today. On a personal level, events like SCALE are also an opportunity to meet others involved in FOSS. This personal touch, is not something that shows up in a balance sheet but it is priceless, and something I hope all the conference attendees take advantage of.

SCALE: What can SCALE attendees expect to see at the HP booth this year?

HP: Our booth may not be what you expect from a company as large as HP. Rather than invest in fancy displays and advertisements, we are going to display our most valued assets, our people. We will put some interesting HP’ers in the booth and hope people will come by and chat. Bryan Gartner, an HP engineer and original architect of linuxCOE (http://linuxcoe.sourceforge.net/) will be demonstrating that project. It’s an easy way for people to try out linux or install it and keep it up to date. HP has used it internally to install many different Linux distros on thousands of machines. Bdale Garbee, HP Linux/Open source chief technologist and uber-geek, will be in the booth after his talk (Peace, Love and Rockets) on Saturday. His daughter Elizabeth will also be there. Elizabeth (a high school junior) will also be giving a talk on Saturday (animation with open source tools).

Adaora Onyia and Susan Bowen are HP program managers active in LinuxChix. They will try to spend some time in the booth talking about communication and women in open source. I’ll be in the booth on Sunday and happy to talk about and demo FOSSology and FOSSBazaar and HP’s involvement in open source governance. We will also have some give-aways, like a very chic FOSSology/FOSSbazaar t-shirt. Well, maybe “chic” is not the word most people would use, but I like them. Of course, I hope people will also come by the booth (or catch us walking about) and talk about whatever interests them.

SCALE: HP recently released 2 projects, FOSSBazar and FOSSology, which have been generating a lot of discussion in the Open Source community. Can you tell us a little about these projects and their goals?
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BGA: Bruno G. Albuquerque
Kokito: Jorge Mare
Gareth: Gareth Greenaway, SCALE Community Relations Chair

Gareth: So first off, please explain what your roles in the Haiku community are.
BGA: I have been a part of the Haiku community since it started, I guess…
Gareth: When did it start?
Kokito: Aug 18, 2001.
BGA: First, just working as a developer from the outside but eventually I joined the project officially around 6 months after it started more or less.
Gareth: Was that before or after the name switch from OpenBeOS to Haiku?
Kokito: The project started as OpenBeos. The change to Haiku was in 2004.
BGA: I am still a developer in the project (although with real life taking most of my time).
Kokito: I have been involved in the Haiku project since 2006, mainly in the area of marketing. communications. I worked mainly on the (new) website, and organizing events like the Google Tech Talk last year, SCALE (of course!), Kansai Open Source in Japan, etc. The new name was officially announced at the first WalterCon (the Haiku conference), held in Ohio, sometime in August of that year

Gareth: What was the reasoning behind the name change?
BGA: Basically we did that because there could be potential legal problems concerning the use of BeOS as part of our name.
Gareth: Did Palm ever pursue anything regarding the name? Or was the change a precautionary measure?
Kokito: The latter, as far as I know.
BGA: Yes. Palm never really said anything about it.
Kokito: In the end, it was a positive thing, as it helped Haiku develop its own image and identity.
BGA: Sometime ago someone from Access said Haiku was OK, as we were recreating BeOS from scratch. Access currently owns all BeOS trademarks.
Gareth: Has Access done anything with the BeOS trademarks?
Kokito: Not that we are aware of. I mean, other than claim that they own them. David “Lefty” Schlesinger was the person from Access I had contact with. Lefty is the Director of Open Source Technologies at Access. He was always very supportive of our project.
Gareth: That seems to be what most company that buy up trademarks do with them So what is the goal of the Haiku project? Where does its future lead?

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SCALE: Gareth Greenaway, SCALE Community Relations Chair & Orv Beach, SCALE PR Chair
Michael: Michael Shiloh, OpenMoko

SCALE: Michael, what role do you play in the OpenMoko Development Community?

Michael: I’m the advocate for the community within the company, and the advocate for the company within the community. It’s a bit hard to describe, but I try to make sure information, questions, and issues flow as freely as possible between the two.

SCALE: How involved are you with the development of the OpenMoko software and the development of the hardware that runs the software?

Michael: I wear a number of hats. One is to develop sample applications and demonstration code, both pure software projects, but also projects involving add-on hardware. Since the openness of OpenMoko extends beyond the software (e.g. the availability of expansion pads on the PCB) we want to show people how they can extend the hardware as well. In addition, the fact that the USB port is both device and host means that external USB devices can easily be hooked up. I think this will be an invaluable way to prototype new hardware.

SCALE: That’s a really good feature, the host & device based USB port…that’s huge. There aren’t many people are doing that.

Michael: Yeah, that was actually the single feature that caught my eye when I first heard about the project, and caused me to look into it further. of course I loved what I saw. (more…)