Developer Spotlight: Martin Pool

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.

Ah-ha!

[shfted!]

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

majority of contributors and commiters

[Anonymous Coward]

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 devel

Xcode

[pldms]

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

Re:Needed for Gentoo?

[manifest37]

you can. see here [gentoo.org].

Kudos to Martin!

[Anonymous Coward]

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