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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.

1 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. 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.