[ossig] An Introduction

[Peter Butler]

Hi All

I met some of the members of this list the other night at Jaya Kumar's 
fascinating presentation about the OLPC project, but I'd like to 
introduce myself to the list in general (if it's not a breach of list 
etiquette - if it is please let me know and I'll shut up!).

I'm an independent software developer from New Zealand, about four 
months ago I moved to Malaysia with my family to settle here long-term.  
I use free/libre/open-source software in all of my work.  I'm a Python 
programmer, mostly doing web development for companies in New Zealand 
and Australia, although in the past I did J2EE and Java/SWT for 
investment banks and insurance companies in the UK (a memory I'm trying 
hard to suppress).

I try to contribute to open-source projects but being an independent 
developer I need to pay the bills first so my contribution is generally 
limited to documentation, bug reports and helping out on forums.  Here's 
one of the projects I'm building for a customer at the moment:  
http://www.iworldpeople.com

I'm interested in all aspects of free and open-source software, and 
especially in making collaborative and distributed development work in 
practice.  I'm also interested in the way free/open-source software 
changes the way people view work and collaboration, and in the potential 
for these ideas to permeate the rest of society - not just us techies.  
It's been good to see the increasing coverage of free and open-source 
projects in the Malaysian media recently.

I run Ubuntu 7.04 on my desktop and laptop and Debian on the servers I 
administer.  I've also been known to iSwear at the OSX iBox that my wife 
iUses.

If anybody has any questions about the free/open-source scene in New 
Zealand or would like to know anything about New Zealand in general I'd 
be happy to help out.  Thanks for reading.

Cheers

Peter