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Developer Spotlight: Martin Pool

Posted by Hemos on from the under-the-spotlight dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Martin Pool is a Canberra-based software engineer working on open source software for HP. In 2003 he won the Australian Unix and Open Systems' Australian Open Souce Award for his work on the distcc distributed compiler. Builder AU recently caught up with Martin to talk about his work, SCO and open source software. Complete story" And, having meet him, and kinda worked with him a bit, Martin's one heckuva guy.

8 comments

  1. Ah-ha! by shfted! · · Score: 1

    Ahh! So that's what happened to that Martian Pool of water on Mars!

    --
    He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
  2. majority of contributors and commiters by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    in mature projects fits this profile. I contribute regularly to apache projects for numerous reasons. the top reasons is because software is never perfect. given that is the starting point, having access to the code make my life easier. If there's a major flaw in the server or a library, I can fix it and get on with work. With microsoft that is not an option. In the last 2 years I've found bugs that created a potential risk to the project I was on. Luckily I was able to patch the code and move on with development. The patches got commited to CVS and I didn't have to throw away all the work our team had done.

    In the past, when I used IIS, ASP or ODBC, that wasn't an option. Which resulted in delays and people getting hammered by Management. Blaming MS for delays looks unprofessional, because at the end of the day everyone on the development team is responsible for delivering on time. Waiting some company be it MS, Oracle, Sybase or IBM for a patch is simply to risky for me. Not that these companies don't respond, but their responses are typically months and sometimes a whole year. Which option makes more sense? Decide for yourself.

  3. Xcode by pldms · · Score: 4, Informative

    The article doesn't mention it, but distcc is what Apple's Xcode uses for distributed builds (together with zeroconf for discovering available build hosts). A very useful tool.

    --
    Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
    me a number based on the order in which I joined
  4. Needed for Gentoo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What I would love to see is a distcc for gentoo, where you could have builds run across distcc and get a working fully optimised and speedy build of new & updated packages far quicker than one machine allows. I have 4 2800+ machines here that take enough time on their own keeping up with builds, and if I could harness the time more effectively by doing one build across all 4 machines, then it would save much duplication of effort.

    How about it?

    1. Re:Needed for Gentoo? by manifest37 · · Score: 2, Informative

      you can. see here.

  5. Kudos to Martin! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What isn't mentioned in the article or the writeup is what a sea change this occasion represents. Martin's been passed up for awards and work both, largely because of his outspokenness about alternate lifestyles. If you think things are tough in the US, you can't imagine what life's like in Australia, where there's no such thing as a "hate crime" or enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. For the OSUG award committee to recognize Martin's vast accomplishments is a risk to future funding for the awards, and a potential press nightmare. Let's hope that global recognition and endorsement of the awards offsets any difficulties resulting from this positive step for Australia.

    1. Re:Kudos to Martin! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, Martin made it much easier for me to come out. When I ran across his mailing lists and found how casually he could joke about these things, and how nobody else seemed offended or attacked him for it, I was floored.

      Say what you will about the open software community. Some people may be hot tempered, some may be exclusionary or quick to criticize, but I've yet to find a group so willing to accept people from all walks of life.

      Thanks to more than Martin and OSUG. Thank you to everyone for making open source a true open community!