By Benjamin: What are you passionate about?
Michael: I’m very passionate about communities, and still consider myself a community member first, and Canonical employee second. I was a part of the Ubuntu community for many years before joining Canonical, and I’ve seen how it’s changed over the years, people coming and going, and some people staying for the long game. Communities are very complex, and often hard to understand, but I do love working with them.
I’m also still passionate about programming, everything from the platform to the SDK to the apps. I’ve spent so much of my life doing is, working with the good and the bad, that I’m always looking for a better option or a way to make an existing one better. That’s why Open Source is so appealing to me, first it usually provides a better option, I can look at the code and learn how to do something better, and I can change to code to make something better. I make an effort now to only use open source for this reason, not for political or ethical reasons, but because it providesopportunity that closed source can’t.
In my personal live, I’m passionate about my friends, family, and food.
I do love to cook, and have become the BBQ guy among my family and friends. In fact I met most of my LoCo team in person for the first time by throwing a big BBQ at my house. I also enjoy reading, especially for education, and have been making my way through books on history, politics and economics. There’s a lot of really great stuff that’s out of copyright now, and my nook is pretty heavily loaded.
Benjamin: You use Ubuntu as your main OS and Ubuntu Touch on your phone but do you play with anything else?
Michael: Not much these days, but that’s mostly for lack of time, not lack of interest. In the past I’ve run Suse (before it was acquired by Novell), CentOS and Fedora. I also used Android for several years before having an Ubuntu phone. I stay away from Windows as much as possible. I do try to keep up with the developments of different projects, both other distros and desktops as well as other mobile platforms like Tizen, SailfishOS and FirefoxOS. But in my spare time I generally prefer to pick up my nook and read.
Benjamin: You used to run a project called Qimo can you tell me more about that?
Michael: Qimo was an Ubuntu-derived distribution that I made, along with my wife and brother (who did all the graphics), specifically for kids. It was based on a slightly modified Xfce desktop configuration that I had originally made for my own kid’s computer, plus a selection of open source games provided by the Ubuntu repositories. The first version was just a modified CD image, but by the second I learned how to make Deb packages, get them into the Ubuntu Universe repository, and even turn it into an installable desktop session.
Qimo was a lot of fun, taught me a huge amount about Ubuntu and Linux, but it was also an enormous amount of work. We released two versions, the last one based on Ubuntu 10.04. After that several changes in Ubuntu and Xfce meant that I would have had to re-build most of the customizations I was doing, and I simply didn’t have the time to do it. But, the story doesn’t end there. Qimo’s interface was basically a top panel and a launcher with big icons. It’s simple, intuitive for children of all ages, and worked an awful lot like Unity. So much so, that I’m starting to look at how much work it would be to create a new version of Qimo that uses an unmodified Unity rather than customize Xfce, which would mean significantly less work for me. The games that Qimo uses are still in the Ubuntu repositories, and in fact the Qimo wallpapers are too, so there might be a Qimo 3.0 sometime in the next year. Who knows, maybe there will be a “Qimo Touch” one day too.
– Interview by Benjamin Kerensa
