Interview with FreeBSD Developer Joe Marcus Clarke

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 22:59 +1000, Michael Tran wrote:
> Here you go, I've just finished transcribing it.  Let me know if you
> need it hosted somewhere.
> Michael
> 
> ps, don't expect it to be 100% accurate!  I didn't know everything
> that was mentioned.
> 
> ----
> 
> Will Backman [0:38]
> Today we're speaking with Joe Marcus Clarke and he is a FreeBSD
> developer.  so i want to thank him for coming on this podcast, maybe
> give him an opportunity to introduce himself and explain the different
> things you're working with the FreeBSD project.
> 
> Joe Marcus Clarke [0:56]
> Thank you.  My name's Joe Marcus Clarke.  I've been a FreeBSD
> developer now for I believe four years.  I've been using FreeBSD for
> over ten and a half and my main focus [way?] I got into FreeBSD [way?]
> was in the committing part of FreeBSD was with the Gnome project. 

I started using FreeBSD in November 1995.

>  I
> also wear a few other hats in the project: I do work with the port
> management team and I do repository work. So repo copies for those in
> the FreeBSD know I do the copies of old ports to new ports for
> developers.  I've also done some minor userland work specifically for
> [skiny|skinning] Cisco IP phone telephony in our lib alias, our NAT
> gateway. 

Skinny (used by Cisco IP phones to communicate with the Call Manager).

>  But Gnome is, still is, and will be my main primary focus in
> the project.
> 
> Will Backman [1:45]
> And what got you interested in the Gnome desktop?
> 
> Joe Marcus Clarke [1:48]
> I guess a funny story I'd... Back in the day, I just transitioned away
> from KDE to[Astrastep?]

Afterstep

[snip]

> Will Backman [9:49]
> And when you say other desktop development groups, are you hinting at
> other desktop environments such as KDE?
> 
> Joe Marcus Clarke [9:55]
> Yes.  I'm hinting at KDE.  There is a Portland project which has been
> announced recently.  Portland is more for making applications for
> desktop agnostics.  The Free Desktop Project which sponsors HAL,
> sponsors DBUS, and a few other things, is trying to unify the
> desktops.  Instead of this constant competition and [fight]shedding

bike shedding

> and wars over whose desktop is better.  Unifies some of these
> underlying things to avoid code duplication and to come up with a best
> of breeds for doing some common desktop related tasks.
> 

[snip]

> Will Backman [22:09]
> Were there any thing else you wanted to talk about related to Gnome or
> other projects you're working on?
> 
> Joe Marcus Clarke [22:15]
> Well I open partition any listener if they're willing to help out with
> the project, we have numerous ways people can volunteer.  Our
> documentation can sometimes be a bit lacking so if there's people out
> there with a creative bug or good at technical documentation, that's
> always helpful.  And as I mentioned before, getting the HAL (the
> hardware abstraction layer) project successfully working on FreeBSD
> would be a great win.  It's not a silver bullet, it's not going to
> make us perfect by any means, but it'll go a long way to bringing in
> some much needed.. that cool desktop features of FreeBSD.  And just
> yesterday, fortunately, one of our team members, Jean Eve, he said

Jean-Yves

Thanks for transcribing this, Michael.

Joe
-- 
PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc
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