Yavor Blagovestov Doganov

I hate writing autobiographies.

I first came to free software in the early 90's. Back then, I felt something was utterly wrong and unjust but I didn't know what exactly. At that time, Internet access in my country (Bulgaria) was very restricted. Even though I worked for a large company then, we didn't have Internet. I gathered information sparingly, from foreign magazines, colleagues and friends. My first distro was Caldera OpenLinux (sic); I got the CD from a magazine. I tried Slackware for a while; it was probably the most popular distro in Bulgaria at that time. I didn't like it (or Slackware didn't like me, it doesn't matter much). I switched to Red Hat afterwards, as it was advertized as a distro for businesses and I was intending to run my business entirely with free software. In the late 90's I killed the widely popular "dual boot" configuration, purged all non-free packages and became a happy citizen of the Free World.

Some time later, I couldn't upgrade from Red Hat to Fedora and that irritated me a lot. I knew about Debian, but the rumours were that it was a highly technical distro only suitable for geeks. I was not (and still am not) a programmer, so that didn't sound like the right choice for me. I even tried to install potato (I think) once, without success (it turned out that the CD that came with the magazine was broken; the editors apologized publicly in a later edition). However, several friends have told me only good things about Debian, and I knew Anton Zinoviev (zinoviev) -- the first Bulgarian DD, so I decided to give it a fair chance without prejudice. I never looked back. I remember I spent the first few weeks reading the DFSG, the Social Contract, the specifics of the system and the immense arsenal of Debian-specific tools that come with it. Later, I came to know Ognyan Kulev (ogi), who worked on the GNU/Hurd port, Damyan Ivanov (dmn) -- a nice Perl guy, and George Danchev (danchev) -- another nice C++ chap (to clarify -- I mean "nice" for George, not the language).

In 2004 I led the migration from Windows to Debian GNU/Linux for my employer then, an international shipbrokers company. We were already using GNU/Linux on the servers (another distro), but moved them to Debian. For a very short time all workstations were migrated; we used GNOME as desktop. I am also using Debian for my current business, a small factory for production of thermoplastic materials for elastic dentures and construction of automatic pneumatic injectors for them.

I don't remember when I started contributing to Debian, probably around that time or a few years later. Bug reports, translations, little unspectacular things. I was already engaged as translator "upstream" -- GNOME, GNUstep, the Translation project and gnu.org.

I switched my attention to GNUstep, because there were basically no volunteers. There were lots of people interested in GNOME, KDE, Python, Java, etc., but GNUstep wasn't able to attract neither developers nor users. And still isn't. Oddly enough, people don't jump out of their seats with excitement when they see boxy, grayish, strangely named thingies. With it being a liberation effort, I thought I could concentrate in an area that is mostly unattended but still important for the GNU project and the Free World as a whole. I started submitting bugs and patches to the Debian BTS, and now I (co-)maintain a decent number of packages, including the core libraries. For a few years I maintained a peculiar web-browser, kazehakase (at least I tried to).

I also wrote a large portion of one package upstream that is part of the GNU project infrastructure -- GNUN (http://gnu.org/software/gnun), although unfortunately I can't dedicate much time to it lately.

I intend to continue working on GNUstep and help integrate it better in Debian. Should I be granted the privilege of upload rights (a great responsibility), in my rare spare time I'd like to work on keeping orphaned packages in shape. I know it sounds unexciting, but I feel that is also important for the Debian project.