BryceHarrington

Revision 2 as of 2007-05-19 23:21:24

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Contact Info

  • Email: "bryce at bryceharrington dot org"

  • IRC: bryyce at irc.freenode.net

About Me

I've helped get a variety of open source projects off the ground, and especially enjoy building successful communities. Most recently I co-founded and help run a project called Inkscape. Professionally, I worked for the Open Source Development Labs building automated test harnesses, web app development, and NFSv4 testing from 2001-2007. Before that I designed spacecraft propulsion systems. Today I'm with Canonical as Ubuntu's Xorg maintainer.

I am passionate about open source and open content communities, and feel strongly that projects founded on a solid community are inherently better than any others. I've been involved in the early stages of a number of these sorts of projects - Mozilla, Wikipedia, OCAL, etc. - I guess I'm sort of an open source entrepreneur at heart.

I've used a number of distros, generally preferring ones that seem to have vibrant communities. I was very impressed by the quality of mandrake's community-supported packaging and used them for about 4 years. From that I switched to gentoo, which seemed the most community-oriented distro at the time. But Ubuntu's combination of community focus, politeness, and good (deb-based) packaging system convinced me that it was far and away the best. I want to help solidify Ubuntu's superiority by strengthening the communities behind it.

Since mandrake integrated KDE quite nicely, I've had a strong preference for KDE. Despite this, most of my coding experience has been GNOME, due largely to my Inkscape involvement. Ubuntu's good GNOME integration is quickly winning me over, however. Ultimately, though, I'd like to see much of the Gnome or KDE specific things be done at the X level.

Contributions to Ubuntu

  • installation testing of feisty & bug reporting

  • Bug triaging in launchpad for xorg, xorg-server
  • Drafted specifications for bulletproof-x and xorg-7.3

  • Packaging:

    • Merged Inkscape 0.45.1 for gutsy
    • Merged xorg-server 1.3 for gutsy
    • Merged xserver-xorg-video-evdev 1.1.5 for gutsy
    • Merged xserver-xorg-video-mga 1.4.6.1 for gutsy

Goals

People judge books by their covers, and for Linux the book cover is drawn on X. Thus I feel that in order to make Linux successful as a desktop operating system, xorg must be improved. In particular:

  1. Monitor detection. Everyone complains about this. it needs to "just work", including HD and multi-monitor.

  2. Xorg testing community. Tons of people love fiddling with xorg; if they can be organized into an effective analysis community, we could address a lot of xorg's hardware-specific troubles.

  3. Graphics driver project relations. Whether it's open source reverse engineer communities or proprietary graphics driver vendors, we need to provide them good testing resources and gain rapid feedback for real issues.

  4. Eye candy. From beryl/compiz to opengl and other powerful technologies, we have the tools to make Linux absolutely beautiful. We simply need to get organized about integrating these things and making their stability rock solid.