Bureaucrats, confirmed, Administrators
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Hi, my name is Greg Rundlett. <ref>These notes are for the slides at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W7rIyeStX9_FDeBA2CMyhzSA01g6r71Ht4YvhpYPM3w/edit?usp=sharing</ref> I was born and grew up in Rhode Island originally and have lived in the Boston Massachusetts area after attending the University of Rhode Island and also the Universite d'Orleans in France. In school I thought I'd be a doctor and thought it important to speak multiple languages so I dual-majored in Biology and French. I became a stock broker for Dean Witter Morgan Stanley after graduation. I trained at the former World Trade Center in fact, so it's a bit surreal to be back now in New York City. About 7 years later and with the advent of the internet I finally found my true calling in technology. One of the early companies I worked for was a venture-funded startup that used wiki technology and Perl on the backend to make content authoring easier for non-technical users by translating wiki markup into HTML. This was 20 years ago; before markdown or MediaWiki etc. So, I'm self-taught in technology and these experiences have shaped my perspective in the value of Free Software.
I believe in free knowledge. I believe in Free Software. I'm a longtime GPL advocate. But the GPL, despite being 30 years old, is still fighting an uphill battle against multiple forces. MediaWiki, the software, is one of the most popular free software projects in the world. Thankfully, MediaWiki is one shining example of a GPL project that is "winning". And for many good reasons. There is probably no better free software project to contribute to. A few years ago, I started a consulting company to focus on Enterprise Quality Free Software solutions. One client, a major billion dollar software company, had thousands of pages of technical documentation locked up in a proprietary system where finished HTML was the most "workable" format they could extract from the system for publishing to their users. They had already decided to adopt MediaWiki as their new documentation platform. And so they hired me to create a custom extension that would import all that HTML documentation, transforming it into MediaWiki format. This talk is about what was that experience like and how did I get them to release the code under the GPL?