int main()

Sorry for this being a little late, but Paul Eggert came and spoke to the UCLA LUG and interested parties this past Wednesday.

Eggert spoke about several things, including how he became involved with free software, his take on the free software community, how to get involved in free software, and projects he thinks would be great to have done.

Eggert mostly became involved with free software as a result of what he calls laziness. Essentially, he got tired of re-patching emacs to work on his (unusual) architecture, so he started submitting patches to Stallman. From there, he just continued submitting patches.

Similarly, Eggert thinks that the best way to get involved in free software is to just start contributing. In order to get noticed, he recommends that people pick “medium-sized” patches; not something small enough that another person could do in 15 minutes, but also not large enough that it makes any major changes. An example of a “medium-sized” project would be patching to take advantage of multi-core systems. Since most programs currently are designed with a single-core architecture in mind, some significant improvements in speed could be obtained by moving it to multi-core. Doing something like this would help to build one’s reputation in the meritocracy of the free software community.

In terms of the future, Eggert thinks that we need new languages to properly take advantage of multi-core. In particular, he mentioned projects like Hadoop are steps in the right direction. Additionally, he thinks that the current shell is too complicated for non-trivial tasks.

Anyway, happy halloween!