No not New Deal Tobacco & Candy Company, nor Nike or Pepsi (though, I can't wait forever guys, come on!)

No, I'm talking about my Debian and Ubuntu sponsors. Without you, all of my hard work would be sitting in a queue somewhere with no love.

You see, just because I work for Canonical, doesn't mean I get an automatic berth in the Ubuntu Developer community, nor does it give me any clout with the Debian Developers. The beauty of the open source community, is that it is and probably always will be, a meritocracy. What have you done? What is your level of commitment? How well you can answer those questions at any given time defines how much people trust you, and therefore, your level of autonomy and leadership.

So, folks like me who have just entered the fray in Ubuntu, and who only dabbled in Debian, must prove ourselves. And, to whom will we prove ourselves? Why, sponsor developers.

So, without further ado, These are a few of the sponsors who have made sure that my work has gotten out there in the past few weeks and months, and a few who have made sure that my * shoddy* work has not. THANKS GUYS!

  • Chuck Short (zul) - Ubuntu uploads of bug fixes and warranted critiques of half-assed PHP solutions.
  • Dustin Kirkland (kirkland) - Ubuntu uploads of bug fixes.
  • Scott Moser (smoser) - merging changes for cloud-utils and uploading to Ubuntu
  • Chris Cheney (ccheney) - Upload of gearman-interface source package into Debian (my first debian upload!)
  • Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) - Reviewed first gearman-interface package and convinced me to upload a proper gearman-interface package w/ swig bindings
  • Piotr Ożarowski (POX) - Educated me on finer points of Debian Python Policy
  • Thierry Carrez (ttx) - Upload of various bug fixes into Ubuntu, and sparing me "The look"
  • Matt Zimmerman (mdz) - Instruction on proper maintainer script procedures for memcached
  • Mathias Gug (mathiaz) - Endless attention to detail while reviewing my merge proposals, and "SNAILS!"
  • Thomas Goirand - Responsiveness on crusty old packages like libdbi
  • Kees Cook (kees) - MIR reviews for Ubuntu, and convincing me to get on the metro back to the hotel instead of face the Prague deluge with my little 100Kč (about $5 US) umbrella
  • The people I've missed - I can't remember everyone, but thank you if you helped me and Ubuntu, and Debian out!

I'll try to do this more often, but I don't know if I can really single everyone out. Its amazing how many people work together so smoothly, despite the group above being spread out over, by my count, at least 7 countries and 5 time zones.