Open source and I

open source and I go quite a way back. All the way to 1995 when I uploaded "WFDOS" to a Compuserve area or forum or whatever they were called. WFDOS is a utility for integrating DOS-tools for use within IBMs Workframe/2, part of the VisualAge C++ suite of tools. If you google it, you'll quite likely come across references or maybe even a download. I know I have seen it listed on sites that collect OS/2 tools and utilities.

Going even further back to the 80s, I suspect my first encounter with "open" source was MVS 3.8 on microfiche or tape and later on JES/328X, an RJE spooler for MVS, on paper. I think I might even still have the JES328X source code somewhere up on the attic.

I was probably a little late getting on the Linux bandwagon, perhaps because I was a keen OS/2 developer at home, and writing IBM mainframe system software in the office. My focus was first turned towards Unix (HP-UX, AIX) in the mid-90s. I purchased my first copy of SuSE Linux, version 4.4.1, around 1996 I think. I remember Linux kernel 1.3 and that 2.0 was a big step forward. One of my significant achievements around 1998/1999 was getting an ancient 486DX2 office desktop set up in cupboard, running our home internet gateway/firewall, kernel 2.0.36.

The following is a list of my open source contributions, in no particular order:

• dosemu

to be completed.

• clamav

Couple of new freshclam options: doodledee and doodledum.

bwclamd: a reworked clamd. work in progress. In production, but not yet published.

• etherboot

To be honest, I think I only wrote one, maybe two patches, i.e. nothing major.

• hercules-390

I contributed support for a number of IEEE-754 floating point instructions, primarily to enable running a Java virtual machine on Linux-390. I was working for BEA systems at the time, and running/demoing BEA Weblogic (and associated products) on Linux-390 was one of my key responsibilities.

• SAPDB

I honestly cannot remember how I got involved in this, but SAPDB was released as open source by SAP AG in 2000 or thereabouts. I can't remember why, but I knew that SAPDB used to be called Adabas, and used to run on MVS/SP (or some such). Getting it build and run on Linux-390 (using Hercules-390), was just too much of a temptation.

• linux kernel

A two line change to provide support for 88se9125.

• nasm

Whilst writing some assembler code for 64-bit Linux, I spotted a bug in the stack generation code, and wrote a patch.

• analog (weblog analyzer).

I added support for output in XML.

• PMMail

Packaging

Starting sometime early-to-mid 2011, I started getting involved in packaging software for openSUSE. My first "project" was upgrading nasm such that a patch I had submitted earlier would be automatically included.