1. BACKGROUND My formal education is in theoretical physics with a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1992: * B.Sc. physics Brock, U., St. Catharines, Ontario * M.Sc. physics Guelph U., Guelph, Ontario * Ph.D. physics Cornell U., Ithaca, New York * Postdoc, chemical physics McMaster U., Hamilton, Ontario Since 1995 I've been a professor at D'Youville College, Buffalo New York where I've taught physics and programming. 2. CONTRIBUTIONS TO GENTOO I have used Gentoo since 2003. I have contributed since 2008 and been a developer since 2009. I actively maintain about 100 packages for Gentoo [1] and I am active in several projects, subprojects and other initiatives [2]: * Hardened Gentoo: - I maintain the hardened kernel sources - I restructured and maintain the hardened profiles - I assist Zorry in testing the hardened toolchains - I work on migration of PaX flags from ELF phdr to xattrs * Hardened uClibc: - I ported the hardened toolchain from glibc to uClibc - I maintain uclibc stage3s for amd64, arm, mips and x86 - I built and maintain an XFCE4 desktop system based on amd64-uclibc-hardened * Hardened musl: - I ported the hardened toolchain from glibc to musl - I maintain musl stage3s for amd64, arm, mips and x86 - I'm working on an XFCE4 desktop based on amd64-musl-hardened * libressl: - picked up from where hasufell left off * Minor arch love: - I am on the arm, mips, ppc and ppc64 arch teams - I built and maintain an XFCE4 desktop for the Lemote Yeeloong (mips64el) * Codebases I wrote or maintain: - eudev - an isolation of udev from systemd [3] - sthttpd - fork of thttpd which was abandoned by upstream [4] - hwmultd - a daemon to multicast hardware info [5] - elfix - utility to do PaX markings in both ELF phdrs and xattrs [6] - install-xattr and install.py - C and python wrappers to coreutil's install which preserves filesystem extended attributes [6] * Current project: - I am currently working on a project called GRS which is an acronym for "Gentoo Reference System." As a meta distribution, Gentoo allows for a vast array of choice for how a system is built from source. In the absense of a conscious effort, it is unlikely that any two Gentoo systems are "similar" enough that executables and/or libraries from one system will "just work" on the other. A GRS system is a well defined Gentoo system in which all these choices are specified in configuration files housed on one central repository. One can maintain a GRS by either using binpkgs built on a central server, or by building locally or both. A GRS suite of utilities guarantees that no matter how the system is maintained, it is always "identical" to another GRS. The GRS suite is written in python and can be found at [9]. The central repository of GRS's is at [10]. * Other projects: - tor-ramdisk - a micro uclibc distro to host a tor relay in ram [7] - Tin Hat - run an entire gnome desktop in ram, based on hardened Gentoo of course [8] 3. VISION FOR GENTOO Gentoo's quality of being a "meta" distribution gives it the flexibility to easily target many "exotic" systems: minor arches, alternative kernels, alternative C libraries, alternative toolchains in addition to the usual assortment of packages found in any distro. This flexibility is not just limited to our core systems, but extends to all of Gentoo and has been our way since the beginning. It opens up a space for creativity and innovation which the rest of the open source community benefits from. I am not interested in seeing Gentoo score high on distrowatch.com, but I am interested in seeing it contribute to and being well respected within the open source community. The benefits are most obvious in our derivative like Sabayon and Pentoo which reach our end users, but extend in more subtle ways to other end-user products like ChromeOS [11] or Engine-Yard's cloud computing [12] which are significantly impacting society. I have learned a lot from you, the members of this community. Gentoo has great value in our world. Not only does it export its code, but it exports its talent. 4. ISSUES I would aim to: * Foster good relationships with our downstreams (eg Sabayon and Pentoo), with our upstreams, and amongst ourselves. * Work to establishing a culture of respect between Gentoo developers and developers outside our circle. * Work to maintain a fine balance between well established shared codebases and practices, like toolchain, and QA which affects us all, and the freedom to pursue individual, side, experimental, crazy, wild projects. * Support QA and PMS specs and other standards in a manner that fosters creativity and doesn't stiffle it. * Work with developers who want to pursue their projects and need the Council's attention. REFERENCES [1] http://euscan.gentooexperimental.org/maintainers/blueness@gentoo.org/ [2] http://dev.gentoo.org/~blueness/ [3] https://github.com/gentoo/eudev/commits/master [4] http://opensource.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=sthttpd.git;a=summary [5] http://opensource.dyc.edu/gitweb/?p=hwmultd.git;a=summary [6] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/elfix.git [7] https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor-ramdisk.git [8] http://opensource.dyc.edu/tinhat [9] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/grss.git [10] https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/grs.git [11] In 2010, Google switch to Gentoo for portage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_OS [12] Qutoing https://support.cloud.engineyard.com/entries/23031458-Engine-Yard-Gentoo-12-11-FAQs: "A new Gentoo distribution has now reached General Availability (GA) and is based on current upstream Hardened Gentoo."