Finishing up our interviews with this year’s Women in Open Source speakers, we had a chance to sit down with Emma McGrattan, SVP of Engineering at Ingres. We had a chance to discuss the world of open source databases as well as many early forms of free and open source software.

- Gareth

Emma: I’m originally from Ireland, and have an Electronic Engineering degree from Dublin City University. I have had a fairly nomadic existence since leaving college back in 1989 and I’ve lived in LA, Dublin, London and New York. I currently live in New York but spend about 50% of my time on the road, pretty much evenly split between Europe and the US.  Despite the fact that I haven’t really lived in Dublin since 1989 I get back there every 6-8 weeks and still call Dublin home.

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Continuing our discussions with this year’s Women in Open Source speakers, we sat down with Rikki Kite, Associate Publisher and Managing Editor at Linux Pro Magazine. We had a chance to talk about the world of publishing in the open source world as well as the often false assumptions that are often made about people.

- Gareth

Rikki: I dropped out of college at KU and moved to Austin, Texas in January 1991. After taking some time off to enjoy the music scene in Austin, I went back to school and completed my B.A. in English at UT in 1996. I moved back to Kansas the last week of 1996, and have been living in Lawrence and working in publishing since then. Eventually I went back to KU and completed my Master’s in Journalism in 2008.

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Continuing our discussions with this year’s Women in Open Source speakers, we sat down with Cathy Malmrose from ZaReason.  We had a chance to discuss what it’s like to run a Linux-only hardware company but still support Windows users, as well as discuss ways to encourage young girls into technology and open source.

- Gareth

Cathy: French speaking DJ, elementary teacher, technical writer, ghostwriter, curriculum developer, road warrior, and most prominently a hardware geek.

Gareth: You founded Zareason; what led you to starting the company?

Cathy: I grew up in Microsoft’s back yard, then spent five years in Austin, Texas in a Dell neighborhood making friends and seeing how their company functioned. When we moved to the Silicon Valley area and were surrounded by the top-tier hardware suppliers, the decision was obvious that I would go into Linux hardware. I saw how hard it was to find well-built Linux hardware and I also saw how superior Ubuntu and other distros had become.

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Continuing our discussions with this year’s Women in Open Source speakers,  we sat down with Sharon Levy, PHP developer and local Southern California FLOSS enthusiast.  We had a chance to discuss of the inner workings of PHP Certification as well as the best ways to deal with negative first impressions of the FLOSS community.

- Gareth

Sharon: After attaining a B.A. from UCLA, I subsequently earned a certificate in C/UNIX from UCLA Extension.  I made a mid-career transition from being an administrative assistant to becoming a Web Developer, choosing to specialize later as a PHP Developer.  As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of industries including new media, e-commerce and avionics.  This past September, I became one of the very few women in the world who is a Zend Certified Engineer in PHP5.

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Continuing our discussions with this year’s Women in Open Source speakers,  we sat down with recently appointed GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters.  We had a chance to discuss some history of GNOME on alternative platforms as well as efforts to get FOSS computers into the hands of school children in Mexico.

-Gareth

Stormy: Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it now, I have a degree in computer science and started out my career writing code. If someone had told me about open source software in college, I would have started out my career working on open source. As it was, I had to wait a few years to stumble across it.

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SCALE had the opportunity to sit down with the speakers for this year’s Women in Open Source Conference.  We began with Dru Lavigne and ended up speaking on a variety for topics including Dru’s thoughts on being a woman in the FOSS community as well as her work with the FreeBSD community and the BSD Certification Group.

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SCALE had the opportunity to speak with Joe Born, CEO of Neuros Technology about open hardware, DRM, TV Mashups, and their new Neuros Link device.

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Most people who are using a commercial Personal Video Recorder today are unknowingly using an open source-powered appliance. Unfortunately many aspects of these devices remain closed. There have been many efforts to offer a completely free & open alternative to these devices. One such effort is the KnoppMyth/LinHes project. SCALE had the opportunity to chat with the project leader for this open source media center project, Cecil Watson.

- Gareth J. Greenaway

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