ROSE Blog Interviews: Margarita Manterola, Debian Developer

“Q: What do you currently do in open source and what do you love
about it?

“A: I do many things with Open Source. I develop open source
software at the office, I help administrate an installation of over
200 users of Debian GNU/Linux, and every semester, in the course
where I teach, we give the students a Live CD that they can use to
develop software under GNU/Linux. And, obviously, I also help
developing Debian.

“The activity I like the most is fixing bugs. It’s one of the
great things of open source and the one that I enjoy the most: by
having the code available, I’m able to fix a program and make it do
what I want without having to go through the original
developer.

“Q: What’s your experience with the Debian Project?

“A: I started participating in Debian in 2003. At first, all I
did was report bugs and try to fix a few. I was afraid of making
mistakes, of people not receiving my bug reports well. In 2004 I
went to DebConf, that is the annual Debian Developers conference,
which was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. I met a lot of very nice
and interesting people there, and I was encouraged to participate
more actively in the project. Also, there the Debian Women project
was founded, and very quickly I became involved with the
project.”

Complete Story