Featured: Gonéri Le Bouder, FusionInventory.org

12.05.2011 15:01
Anika Kehrer

Gonéri Le Bouder is both an employed software developer and a Debian developer. Debian is sometimes referred to as the best example for those projects, which get mad at the idea of commercial interests. Gonéri from Paris gives some hints for a definition for this conflict: For example, volunteers like new features, whereas companies prefer long term support.

Talk "GLPI and FusionInventor", together with Walid Nouh, Wednesday, 11.05.2011, Room Berlin II, 3 - 4 p.m: GLPI/FusionInventory is a software suite for hardware and software inventory and network devices discovery, IT asset management as well as ITIL compliant incident management system. The talk will introduce the functionnalities of the stable versions and will make a demonstration of their usage. To Gonéri's Talk

Backstage with Gonéri

Gonéri, you are developing both on the free project Debian and on the GLPI/FusionInventory project. GLPI/FusionInventory is commercially supported for example by your company teclib. Do you sometimes feel there's a conflict between free software and its commercial use?

GLPI/FusionInventory and Debian are both used in the 'commercial' world and are supported by some companies. Volunteers are in general interested by new features whereas company are looking for long-term support, documentation and training. Companies are also willing to pay developers to get complex new feature because they need it. The challenge here is to preserve the integrity and architecture of the project and ensure it will remained open to every user and contributor.

People from the non-FOSS world often wonder how money can be made with free and open source software. What is your experience with explaining this to a non-FOSS business person?

They understand, that my company does consulting, support and development around GLPI/FusionInventory.

Apart from FusionInventory, Debian and the whole Tekkiverse - which part of life is of special interest for you, something you personally find really fascinating?

My family plays an important role in my life.

In work life, you are a specialist for FusionInventory at teclib, a company in Paris, that provides FOSS technologies to other companies. For those who try to envision what that means: What does a typical "Gonéri-day" look like?

There is no typical day and this is what I like about my work. Depending on the day I may be coding, or dwelling into system administration, or consulting, etc.

Why did you choose to present a talk at LinuxTag 2011?

Our solution is popular in France but sadly not yet in all Europe. Therefore we choosed LinuxTag to spread the news about it.

Gonéri's Data Sheet

Place of birth: Vannes in Brittany

Place of living: Paris

Age: 29

Favourite programming language(s):
I feel confortable with Perl, PHP, Python, C, C++. I also enjoy doing some hacking with different languages.

Favourite FOSS operating system flavour(s):
Surprisingly, I use Debian GNU/Linux for years. I'm also a big fan of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

A day is perfect for me, if ...
... I've got one or two patches (good ones) in my mailbox from a new contributor.

What is FOSS and Linux all about? My answer in 3 sentences:
FOSS gives more power to technical teams, less to commercial considerations leading to a better product.


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