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| <h2>Spotlight: Volker Quetschke</h2> |
| <p><a href="../lspintro.html">-Louis Suárez-Potts</a></p> |
| <p>2005-05-18</p> |
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| <p>From time to time, we run short interviews--spotlights--of important contributors to the OpenOffice.org community. Volker Quetschke has been important in helping the Windows build process, among other things. He is also member of the <a href="http://council.openoffice.org/esc/index.html">Engineering Steering Committee</a>, which advises the Community Council in technical areas, among other things. This brief interview was conducted via email in May 2005. |
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| <p> <i>Tell us about yourself and what you do besides OpenOffice.org. </i></p> |
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| <p> I'm working at the University of Florida as a Research Scientist for the LIGO project. <a href="http://www.phys.ufl.edu/ligo/">The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory</a> (LIGO) project is a pioneering effort that aims at the direct detection of gravitational waves. (See the <a href="http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LIGO_web/PR/scripts/">PR</a> on LIGO.) I came here after finishing my Ph.D. in physics at the University of Hannover in Germany. </p> |
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| <p><i> How did you get involved in OpenOffice.org? </i></p> |
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| <p> In the first place I got curious about this new free and open source project called OpenOffice.org a few years ago. I tried to build it from source and realized that the build tools required to build it for Windows required a mixture of antiquated (obsolete) free posix tools and a non-free command line tool. I thought that this conflicts with the open source idea and started to work on it in my spare time. </p> |
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| <p> <i>What do you do for OpenOffice.org? </i></p> |
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| <p> Thanks to the massive help of Hans-Joachim Lankenau of Sun in the beginning we managed to modernize the build system of OpenOffice.org for W32 to use mainly the Cygwin environment (<a href="http://www.cygwin.com">www.cygwin.com</a>) and remove the need of other proprietary tools beside the Compiler. </p> |
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| <p> Even though this work was finished the build system as used by the OpenOffice.org community <a href="http://tools.openoffice.org/#Build">http://tools.openoffice.org/#Build</a> needs ongoing maintenance because the developers of our main sponsor unfortunately use a different build environment and this sometimes leads to problems when new features are implemented. As a member of the <a href="http://council.openoffice.org/esc/index.html">ESC</a> I am well aware that there is room for improvements in the coordination with other developers. </p> |
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| <p><i> Where & how would you recommend others to contribute? </i></p> |
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| <p> I cannot really recommend specific tasks, each person has his/her own fields of expertise. A good start is to go to <a href="/contributing/index.html">/contributing/index.html</a> and look for the area you would have the most fun when contributing to our project and help there. </p> |
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