SeaMonkey 2 contributor interviews: sgautherie

It’s been a while, but we are back with our series of SeaMonkey 2 contributor intereviews! This week, it’s time to chat with sgautherie:
Who are you?
My name is Serge Gautherie.
I was born in Paris, France, and I have always lived there.
I was born in the early 1970s.
I’m a computer software engineer:
I’ve worked 7 years on building and maintaining XNet applications with Java EE and Oracle for different companies;
the last few years, I’ve been working on internet games with PHP and MySQL… 😐
Oh, and to curious people, I had 1-2 Nintendo gamepads, an Atari console, an Apple //c computer, some “IBM P.C.” compatibles, …
How did you become a SeaMonkey contributor?
If memory serves (though probably not fully exact)…
I started to use Mosaic then Netscape 2 on Windows 3.1, then Netscape 3 on Win-OS/2 2.1 and AIX, then Netscape 4 on Windows 95.
I switched to Mozilla Application Suite at around 0.9.5 in October 2001, my first comment was in April 2002 (bug 135570), my first filed bug in September 2002 (bug 168815), my first assigned bug about January 2004.
I began contributing with some bug reporting/triaging then I did some simple XUL+JS patches with cvs and Gerv’s PatchMaker.
Eventually, I got a computer with which I could compile and I did some C/C++ patches for a while. Yet I waited for the move to Mercurial repository to become fully active.
Since then, I’ve carried on doing reporting/triaging/QA and a bunch of patches (rarely complicated but still mostly useful).
My main interest is in SeaMonkey, yet I contribute to Core and other projects too 😉
What notable contribution did you make to SeaMonkey 2.0?
I think I’ve done quite some work over the years but I didn’t create any major backend or UI feature.
I’m doing lots of simple (or less simple) ports from Core, Firefox, Thunderbird, and some fixes/enhancements including to tests.
A year ago, I spent a lot of time helping to improve the test harnesses (in trunk and in buildbot), especially in automating leak detection, to name one very visible feature.
More recently, I’ve been working hard on resynchronizing and cleaning up the comm-central configure and build system. This (round of this) task should be completed “soon” :-]
How can users give something back to you?
I really wish I knew!
In the meantime, some who feels like it can try to be a little more than users (which is already great) by contributing howerver seldom: just fo it 🙂
As a note, I discovered in September 2008 that “someone” (;->) at Mozilla Europe had given my name to be invited at the first Moz’Camp (in Barcelona) … and that was the first time I met in person with other Mozillians actually 😀
There have been a few other events which I attended since then and I have started to socialize with them ;-]
Why, in your eyes, should people use SeaMonkey 2.0?
On one hand, I like to find Firefox in public places where a small, fast and secure browser is very useful to stay in touch.
On the other hand, I do like SeaMonkey at home: using and updating an integrated suite (instead of several applications) is so much easier to me.
Did I say I don’t remember the last time I used Windows Internet Explorer 6?
Then why SeaMonkey? It’s open source, it’s free, Mozilla saved us from I.E. monopoly (long) after Netscape was overwhelmed :-/
What next step do you see for SeaMonkey, and what would you like to happen in the Mozilla and SeaMonkey projects?
SeaMonkey 2.1 continuing mission is to explore strang^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hswitch to more new-Toolkit features, as SeaMonkey 2.0 was already a major step after the 1.x series.
The very good news currently are that we’ll soon be able to stop maintaining SeaMonkey 1.1 and we have great hope that KompoZer and SeaMonkey will eventually merge back together this year 🙂
I also wish KaiRo (the SeaMonkey project leader ;-)) could find time to look into whether creating some kind of company to support the project further would be realistic…