I have been contributing to the free software and open source software
communities for more than 16 years. Searching back through Google, it
seems my first public contribution was in 1990.
One of my early major contributions was an Emacs editing mode for the
VHDL hardware description language. That was accepted into the
mainstream Emacs distribution in 1993, and is still in use and actively
maintained today (maintainership has been transitioned to other
developers who still actively use the VHDL language in their work). It
was licensed under the GPL, and the copyright was assigned to the FSF.
I was even able to get a subsequent employer (Motorola) to officially
allow me to continue work on that mode on company time and contribute
improvements back to the community. I also modified the Emacs VC
package (vc.el) to comprehend the commercial ClearCase configuration
management system. I am listed in the GNU Emacs Manual as a major
contributor.
My foray into software for handheld and embedded devices began with the
HP 200LX palmtop computer. At the time I joined the HP-LX development
and user community in 1997, it was very much a binary-only shareware
based development community. I had a significant influence by
championing the benefits of open-source development practices, and
contributed the first open source ethernet packet drivers, TCP/IP
network stack, email and news clients for the HP-LX range. See
http://rwhitby.hplx.net/ for an archive of that work.
After a side-trip into the world of PalmOS programming (contributing
user-interaction improvement utilities for the Treo range of PDAs), I
moved into the world of custom firmware for embedded networking devices.
I contributed to the Linksys WRT54G and Asus WL500g custom firmware
communities for some time, including both software and hardware
contributions. My dual-port serial modification for the WRT54G is widely
referenced. However, in-fighting and varying interpretations of free
software in the WRT54G custom firmware community caused me to look
elsewhere to make a major impact.
I found that place with the Linksys NSLU2 (the “Slug”). I started the
NSLU2-Linux community in July 2004, and it has grown to become a
significant world-wide open-source community of developers and users
(see http://www.nslu2-linux.org/presentation.pdf for a historical
overview of the project). There have been over 100,000 downloads of
NSLU2-Linux custom firmware for the Linksys NSLU2.
I have two strong ideals when it comes to building and maintaining open
source software - if it’s not in a public repository, then it doesn’t
exist, and if it can’t be built automatically from source, then it
doesn’t get released.