After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of the people behind the German “IT-Zukunft Schule” project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm welcome to Angela Fuß.

Samuel Thibault is a French guy like me, but it took years until we met. He tends to keep a low profile, even though he’s doing lots of good work that deserves to be mentioned. He focuses on improving Debian’s accessibility and contributes to the Hurd.

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it’s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the “madamezou” (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then — and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete — she got way more involved [...]

Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink [...]

If you met Ana, you’ll easily remember her. She has a great and pronounced Spanish accent… I’m glad that the existence of the Debian Women project helped her to join Debian because she has been doing a great job.

Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years.

Ben Hutchings is a rather unassuming guy… but hiding behind his hat, there’s a real kernel hacker who backports new drivers for the kernel in Debian stable so that our flagship release supports very recent hardware.

I probably don’t have to present Mark Shuttleworth… he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space.

I saw Francois speak at Debian Day 2010, held up at Columbia University. Francois gave a great talk about supporting Linux for friends and family. I started following his blog and when I started The Linux Setup, he was one of the first people I asked to participate.

Hi, I’m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I’m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and [...]

You might not know who Peter is because he’s not very visible on Debian mailing lists. He’s very active however and in particular on IRC. He was an admin of the OFTC IRC network at the time Debian switched from Freenode to OFTC. Nowadays he’s a member of the Debian System Administration team who runs [...]

When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example.

Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf.

Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.

Swapnil: Can you tell us a bit about yourself? How you got associated with computers?……Stefano: With computers … wow, that’s quite some time ago! I discovered programming when I was 9 year old – I’m 31 now – finding an illustrated book about BASIC programming at the local library (!). Pair that with a C64 [...]

openSuse’s Vincent Untz organized a meeting around cross-platform application installer in Germany. The meeting was attended by developers representing major distros. Debian is one of the most reputed distributions, which also wears the crown of being the father/mother of popular distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. We talked to Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian project leader, to [...]

Michael has been around for more than 10 years and has always contributed to the APT software family. He’s the author of the first real graphical interface to APT—synaptic. Since then he created “software-center” as part of his work for Ubuntu.

I interviewed David Kalnischkies who is not (yet) a Debian developer. But he’s contributing to one of the most important software within Debian—the APT package manager—since 2009. You can already see him in many places in Debian sharing his APT knowledge when needed.

Today I’m presenting you my first interview, today is the turn of Raphaël, a Debian Contributor. I’ve meet Raphaël on his blog. He is interviewing other Debian contributors, and I’m interviewing him, continue reading and know him better.

Colin Watson is not a high-profile Debian figure, you rarely see him on mailing lists but he cares a lot about Debian and you will see him on Debconf videos sharing many thoughtful comments.

I decided recently to publish interviews from Debian contributors and I picked Joey Hess as my first target. He’s one of the few who have heavily influenced Debian by creating software that have become building blocks of the project, like the debian-installer

Zacchiroli, a post-doctoral fellow at a university in Paris, thus has a fairly tough task ahead as he begins his term. He took some time out to speak to iTWire about his plans for the year.

Knoppix is something of a legend as far as system administrators and computer repair technicians are concerned. Most people who know about it have a healthy respect for it.

In this interview, Meike Reichele, a Debian developer living in Germany, offers some practical tips for finding a job in the world of free and open source software.

This week we interview Robert Shingledecker, former DSL developer and now founder of the new kid on the block – Tiny Core Linux. This distro is just 10 MB small and, as the name suggests, it boots to a core graphical environment.