Aussie coders changing the world

Jeff Waugh - GNOME

Jeff Waugh doesn't want to be called a programmer. It's not that he can't code. Instead, he believes his abilities are so modest that emphasising the fact he was once an enthusiastic programmer denigrates the efforts of those he works with on the GNOME project, arguably the leading Linux GUI.

-I joined the GNOME project and hoped I would be able to contribute," he recalls. -I quickly realised that everyone who was on the project was vastly more talented than me and looked for other ways to contribute."

Those contributions have since made his name around the world.

-I joined the release team," he says. -Then the leader of that team moved on, so I ended up running the meetings. After a while he said, 'You're doing my job. Why not do it officially?'"

Waugh took on that role in 2001 and was quickly spun off into what he calls, -a totally new career tangent", in which he worked with the far-flung global GNOME team to co-ordinate releases. He also embarked on evangelist activities to promote GNOME and open source software.

So successful was Waugh in these roles, he now does them for a living.

-I currently work doing business and community development for Canonical," he says, explaining that his employer is the main backer and support provider for Ubuntu Linux. His efforts even saw him named the world's leading evangelist in the 2005 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards.

And evangelism is the activity Waugh expects to do much more of in coming years.

-GNOME is on the bleeding edge of getting software to real end users," he says. -We can make server administrators happy with things like Apache."

-But Firefox and Open Office make people like my mum happy."

But he wants his mum - and the rest of us - to be happy about the society we live in as well as the software we use.

-Technology is all around us in things like mobile phones. And that technology relies on rules inside software."

-It is incredibly important those rules are rules we can see. I see Open Source and free software as a way to guarantee freedom of expression and freedom of association, because if we let our software define those rules underneath us our freedoms disappear and we do not even notice it."

-So the desktop is where I want to see open software go, all using GNOME of course!"

And if that means GNOME being used by large corporations, all the better.

-IBM, Intel and Hewlett Packard sponsored Linux Conference Australia this year," Waugh says. -Any embrace of free software means we are going even further into the lives of ordinary people."

Next Page: Rick Bennett - The Omnium Team