Mandriva Linux Community Words

Our head of technical team Colin Guthrie is an active contributor to the Mandriva Linux distribution - he was asked about his development efforts and why he chooses to give his spare time to push forward free and open source software.

A few of his answers...

When did you start contributing to Mandriva Linux and why?

I officially started contributing to Mandriva back in September 2006 although I had been doing various unofficial packages for a while. I had been a long time user (since back in about 2001-ish) and a fairly regular voice on the cooker mailing list since around 2003. Originally I had been making packages for Compiz as I like pointless eye candy and Olivier Blin said I really should get myself a cluster account considering the amount I do!

Any specific reasons to choose open source software?

For me it's an ideology thing. I'm certainly no Stallman, but I do believe that everyone has the right to a Free computing platform...

How do you see Linux place both for end users and companies in coming years ?

I think it's an interesting place right now and, if I'm honest I'm not sure where it's going on the desktop. More and more services are moving to the "cloud" and I think that a high speed, fully connected world is the ultimate future but is a decade or so away. I think the future may be more light weight Linux installs (when everything is cloud based there is no need for Windows), but even for the short to medium term (read next two decades) desktop Linux will continue to grow in my opinion.

Check out the Q & A session in full at blog.mandriva.com.