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GNU-Friends Interview Andrew L. Moore
By jonas, Section Interviews
Posted on Tue Mar 5th, 2002 at 20:51:28 GMT
GNU-Friends was fortunate enough to be able to do a quick interview with Andrew L. Moore who, among other things, are responsible for GNU ed. He tells of how he got involved with computing, his current work and future plans.

 

Andrew, first of all, could you tell us what Free Software you've been involved in during the years, besides GNU ed which we will talk more about later?

With a loose definition of `Free', I can list:

  • FreeBSD 1.x
  • cflow(1)
  • floatingpoint.h
  • (little stuff that will hopefully one day be worth releasing)

What is your motivation for writing Free Software, and has it changed anything over the years as Free Software has gained more and more popularity?

Free exchange of ideas. Free Software is in the best interests of everyone. That should never change.

If we then turn our attention to GNU ed, which you were involved in from the beginning and continue to maintain. The simple question is; why?

A UNIX root partition without ed? It was just another missing part. And another algorithm taken from the text `Software Tools'.

The last public release of GNU ed was in 1994. Has there been any changes to it since then? Will there every be?

There have been many patches submitted. A new release is expected, in earnest, every year since 1994.

You've been involved in computers in one way or another for many years now. Could you tell us how you got involved in it and what it was that you felt was so interesting about computers?

I obligingly loathed computers as a math student. It was probably a Scientific American article by Tomaso Poggio describing the work of the late David Marr's computational vision group at MIT that got me hooked. Shortly afterward, I spent a summer at MIT's AI labs glued to the screen of a Symbolics Lisp machine, subsisting on Liption's instant noodle soup. That was paradise.

When you're not hacking Free Software, to the extent you do that today, what do you do? What's your current occupation and could you tell us something about that?

I enjoy bicycling and the outdoors, classical guitar, helping my family with the vineyard harvest, astronomy and telescope making. In short, a boring existence.

Last year I was in Taiwan developing a wireless WAN infrastructure. But much of my time is spent doing really mundane work for public good non-profits.

My resume objective: Champion Free UNIX Computing. If the US economy ever turns around, I might try to formalize my consulting services.

If we came looking for you in about five years from now, where would we find you and what would you be up to then?

I enjoyed working with the Taiwanese and have a tremendous respect for their culture. Perhaps I'll be doing (or rather, trying to do) business in a free China.

Or maybe I'll be hacking on a computer algorithm for playing dan-level go.

Anyhow, hacking for sure.

And finally, what kind of computer(s) do you use in your daily work today?

I recently upgraded from an ASUS Pentium II/300MHz system to a dual AMD Athlon. Wow!

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GNU-Friends Interview Andrew L. Moore | 8 comments (8 topical, editorial) | Post A Comment
[new] author(s) of GNU Hello (#1)
by atai (#278) on Tue Mar 5th, 2002 at 21:51:23 GMT
(User Info)

Will we get a chance to see the interview with the author(s) of GNU Hello? It is amazing that GNU Hello compiles without any problem with the supplied configure script, on a latest GNU/Linux system (Red Hat 7.2), even though it has not been updated since 1993.

[ Reply to This ]


[new] Suggestion... (#2)
by kayhayen (#227) on Wed Mar 6th, 2002 at 01:40:24 GMT
(User Info)

Probably this is a good idea, probably a bad. It's for you to decide Jonas.

But wouldn't it be nice, if we had a chance to think of questions before you actually conduct the interview?

Knowing the program at hand, I certainly had some interesting questions on a social/technical level.

Probably it would work, probably not. One can try.

Yours, Kay

[ Reply to This ]


[new] When will GNU ed get a build-in mail reader? (#7)
by Per Abrahamsen (#108) () on Thu Mar 7th, 2002 at 17:29:17 GMT
(User Info) http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/

You forgot the most important question.


[ Reply to This ]


 
[new] Like this website (#8)
by a member of the hurd (#-1) on Fri Dec 10th, 2004 at 08:51:59 GMT

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GNU-Friends Interview Andrew L. Moore | 8 comments (8 topical, editorial) | Post A Comment
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