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Interview with Crazy Pete

Interviewer: Tell us a little about yourself. Who are you? In what way are you associated with GNU or free software?

Crazy Pete: Well, I developed a GPL conversion tool that [was] avalible at http://www.honeyrigs.com/cgi-bin/convert_units.rb. It is written in Ruby although I have developed commercially in C++ most of my life.

Interviewer: How old were you when you started to program?

Crazy Pete: When I started to actually program computers, I was about 25 I think. I were somewhere in my mid 20s. Although I had started studying binary, hexadecimal and octal numeric systems when I was about 16 because I knew that in 10 years, computers would be common.

Interviewer: Tell us about your working environment.

Crazy Pete: I work on free software at home and upload the work to a server.

Interviewer: Do you think that free software can be useful commercially?

Crazy Pete: Yes! I think it allready have been. Free Unix-like operating systems have the dominant share of the server market for example.

Interviewer: What do you think is good about free software?

Crazy Pete: I think it is good because it promotes free exchange of ideas in the same way as scientific journals do. Just as scientists working at universities (as opposed to working at drug companies) we allow each other to freely build on each others work and just as published scientific works allow students (at least at universities that have access to the journals) to learn from them, free software allows budding programmers to see "how things are done, and of course, access to the source code assists in debugging and software quality because the entire world can inspect the code if they wish.

Interviewer: If a kid asked you how to learn program in the most efficient way, how would you answer?

Crazy Pete: I would say the best way is to find something that interests you and develope an application to support it. Then i would recommend that they read books to learn how to develope in the language of their choice and to look at source code that is available to see how experienced people do it.

Interviewer: Thank you for your time and good luck with developing free software in the future!

Crazy Pete: You are welcome and good luck to you too!

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