Paride Legovini

TL;DR: All-around tinkerer passionate about Free/Libre Software and Science. Debian user since 2004. Physicist turned IT engineer. Set up a Debian mirror in the middle of Antarctica.

I began using GNU/Linux in the late 90s (I was in high school), mainly Slackware back then. The reason was in good part technical: it gave me unprecedented control on my system, extremely powerful tools (the unix toolchain), and unlimited things to learn. But I quickly understood how the possibility to share software with others was important, and I began to frequent the local Free Software Users Group and introduced several persons to GNU/Linux. In the following years I also installed and used BSD systems and Debian, but Slackware still was my main distribution.

I switched to Debian in 2004, and the main reason for the switch was ‘apt’: I didn’t want to manually resolve dependencies anymore. At some point I has enough experience to taught some GNU/Linux introductory courses a “student initiative” of my University. I also held seminars at Linux Days and similar events, and contributed in founding a (now quiescent) hackerspace.

As time passed, my knowledge and understanding of the Free Software philosophy got deeper, and I transacted from being a “Linux nut” to being a “Free Software nut”. I came to fully appreciate how important the DFSG are, along with the fact that the Debian Social Contract has the end users and their freedom as its main priority.

In 2009 I read Steven Levy’s excellent “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”, which brought me to founding ninthfloor.org: a noncommercial unix hosting provider which offers only Free Software. It runs Debian, of course.

In 2015, after a decade of daily usage, I felt it was time to give back to the Debian community. I packaged my first Debian package: fonts-hack, and later joined the fonts packaging team. From that moment my involvement only increased: I now maintain several packages, mostly in packaging teams. I package and adopt software I use or find valuable, and plan to maintain in the long term. While packaging I almost always interacted with upstream, sending patches and discussing issues, which resulted in a better upstream package and in a simpler downstream packaging. It’s always good when I can drop a Debian patch because it got upstreamed.

In this process, and after receiving several reviews from my sponsors, I fully realize how the Debian community really strives for technical excellence. I’m impressed, and it’s great to be part of it.