I've been using Debian on most of my systems since about 1999 I think, after some flirts with Slackware. As somewhat of an idealist I very much appreciate the fact that Debian was setup as a (nerdy) social group with a set of values, a constitution, and an elaborate governance structure, and to some extend this aspect came first, even before the quality of the work. I've been advocating free software for a long time in private circles essentially around the argument of trust, transparency and auditability. I grew up with free software and learned programming, networking and system administration by reading other people's code. Now I've been a professional software engineer for close to 20 years and it feels right to give some something back. I've started picking up some packages to maintain, packages that I do use and that had been abandoned, and I quite like the ride thus far. I have kids and many projects in mind so I will probably not be a large contributor, but I commit to give my best to the packages that I intend to maintain. My main areas of interest I guess would be server side things, system tools, software and electronics development tools, etc.
Mathieu Mirmont