I, David Sugar, apply for universe-contributor.

Who I am

Presently I work on ARM related development as part of the Mobile Team for Canonical. I am a founder of and former CTO for Open Source Telecom Corporation, which was started to develop and sell free software for telecommunications. I also have at times been a speaker for the Free Software Foundation, and I chaired a LSM conference on Libre communications a number of years at the University of Bordeaux, France.

My earliest involvement with GNU and GNU/Linux systems are from the early 90's, and my first commercial activity was in the development and sale of Linux powered integration servers for use with Fujitsu telephone switching equipment to U.S. federal government agencies as director of engineering for Fortran Telecom.

I am the upstream maintainer for a number of packages that are also part of the GNU project, including GNU Bayonne, GNU SIP Witch, the GNU Telephonic library ccAudio, the GNU realtime scripting engine ccScript, the GNU RTP stack ccRTP and ZRTP extensions, and GNU Common C++.

Immediately prior to Canonical I had worked on Linux kernel powered cell phones using Open Embedded, and embedded Linux kernel based products such as Raritan KVM switches. I also had been working on encrypted / intercept-free communication systems based on the work of Phil Zimmerman in publishing the ZRTP protocol. Lesser known is my involvement both with helping to develop free software solutions around public standards and free software ethics for the visually impaired, and my work with indigenous communities in North America.

I had originally gained experience packaging software for RPM based distributions such as RedHat in the late 90's, and later packaged a number of things including stuff I was writing, for Mandrake, well before I had learned Debian packaging.

My Ubuntu story

While originally I worked with early distros such as Yggdrasil, during my time as CTO of OST we primarily used RedHat, and somewhere in between for awhile I had experienced Gentoo, I have been using Ubuntu as my primary development platform for a number of years. Since the introduction of Hardy, when I finally retired an old Centos 4 server, my lab has actually been exclusively Ubuntu.

My involvement

I originally established a GNU Telephony team in Launchpad which later merged with the Ubuntu VoIP team. The idea was to consolidate and promote the development and use of telephony services within the Ubuntu community, and to use a PPA to offer updated backports for older distributions of Ubuntu of packages I am an upstream maintainer for. My intent is to have all these packages available through the archive going forward starting with Karmic.

In June (2009) I became responsible for the LXDE desktop specification and have helped with the Lubuntu community distribution including producing the seed and initial meta package used for release. In June I also helped the 389 directory project come together as a team to complete packaging of the 389 directory server for Ubuntu, and as a specific targeted goal for Karmic, as originally expressed at UDS. I have reviewed and helped correct a number of issues in the 389 directory server package. In addition to my involvement in ARM porting, package verification, and training, I have helped put together a proposal for unifying the Ubuntu telephony user experience as presented at UDS in Belgium.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Packages I have recently contributed to Ubuntu include ucommon and sipwitch. These represent a new way to think of creating and deploying secure realtime communication and collaboration services over the public Internet. I also wrote a related Ubuntu specific howto for using these, along with Twinkle, a ZRTP capable VoIP client already in the Ubuntu archive. I also have updated packages I maintain which are in the archive when new upstream releases occur. There have not been many such releases, but recently I did need to update the GNU ZRTP stack through the sponsorship process.

I am very proud of what has happened with the emergence of a 389 directory server team, with my work in the VoIP team to get Asterisk ready for Lucid, with the merging of various LXDE efforts under a unified community driven Lubuntu distribution effort, and with efforts to promote and unify the telephony experience on Ubuntu.

Areas of work

In the Lubuntu project I drafted a spec for LXDE for Karmic, and have advocated which packages should or should not be part of a Lubuntu distro. I also produced the first seed and meta package for Lubuntu for Karmic.

In the 389 Directory Server project I have reviewed and helped with finalizing some packages for Ubuntu, including 389-ds-base and related java-nss. I also prepared some packages for the 389 ppa during this process.

I maintain current releases of a number of packages in the GNU Telephony ppa, including ccrtp, commoncpp2, zrtpzpp, ccscript, sipwitch, twinkle, and ucommon. Some of these already are archived in Karmic so I maintain them for backports for older release series only; ucommon was brought into Karmic by my submission through revu, sipwitch was introduced as part of the domain calling blueprint for Lucid, and ccscript is pending in revu.

With the VoIP team I have been involved in promoting Asterisk for inclusion in Lucid, the development of SIP Witch to offer peer to peer VoIP services, and the use of Telepathy and oFono to unify the desktop telephony user experience.

In addition to those packages I am upstream for, I have submitted a number of packages, patches, bug fixes, ftbfs, merges, etc, over the past year. While I naturally focus on ARM related issues, I have not done exclusively so. If requested, I could try to track down a complete list of packages I have worked on by lp bug #.

Things I could do better

Communicate more with people in the community. Having not come from within or being involved in the Ubuntu community as such until rather recently, I do not know that many people in it.

Plans for the future

General

I am interested in seeing 389 directory server become available and maintained in Ubuntu and the LXDE desktop become a regular part of Ubuntu. I am also interested in seeing all my upstream packages present and updated in the Ubuntu archive starting with Karmic. This includes ccScript 4.0, and ccAudio 3 should it be released within the Karmic release cycle. There will also be a new 3.0 release of GNU Bayonne which I would love to see first introduced through Ubuntu, and long-term I would like to help Ubuntu become the preferred platform for telecommunication development and deployment.

What I like least in Ubuntu

The REVU process sometimes seems to be a dead-zone, where actively worked on packages are completed and become ready for archive, but only to remain there never advocated. This only serves to discourage people from contributing more packages.

Comments

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Endorsements

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== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryUniverseContributorApplication