Well, i'm a lazy guy and i really don't care documenting everything in those fancy, oh-so-cool blogs ...
Said that, i couldn't sleep last night so i got some time to list some of the
OSS projects i've been
involved with. I try to list them in chronological order:
ISDN4Linux is my most well-known project. Founded back in 1995,
it provides the infrastructure for communication via ISDN
in the Linux kernel. At the beginning, there were
my linklevel (the infrastructure) code and just 2 drivers: My ICN driver and Jan DenOuden's Teles driver.
(I found his standalone tty/ISDN driver just when i had finished the linklevel code). I mailed him, proposing to join
my project and he adapted his driver to my linklevel API immediately. Later, when Karsten Keil contributed
his HiSax driver, the project grew quickly. Meanwhile, the whole kernel code was merged into the officoal Linux kernel and
is not distributed separately anymore. Over time, more people got involved and i retired from project leadership.
Todays, i only manage the webspace, mail and CVS.
KDE was (and still is) my favorite desktop. Partly, because
in it's early days, i knew it's founder and most of the people behind it personally. In the early days
(before Version 1.0), i contributed some code to the core libraries. As of now, i'm just an ordinary user.
The project however has grown beyond any expectation and today it is one of the biggest OSS projects in the world.
PLPTools is another project i founded myself. Around 1998,
i got a Psion Series 5 and was disapointed about
it's unability to communicate with anything but Windows. Therefore, i created software for that purpose running on
Linux using a KDE-based GUI. Like with ISDN4Linux, i don't participate actively in that project anymore.
Linux for S/390 started 1999 when i was contracting at
IBM's development and research center in Böblingen. At that time, some developers in Böblingen were working
on a Linux-port for IBM's big iron. After most of the basic work was done, there was some need for a
S/390-based Linux-distibution. Since IBM decided against creating a distribution, i jumped in and ported almost all
packages of a RedHat 6.1 distribution. Later, the results (called "ThinkBlue") were used as distribution base for
SAP's software and adopted by SuSE and RedHat for their S/390 distributions. This project also lead to the foundation of
a company: Millenux
OpenNX is an open source replacement for Nomachine's NX client. I started this project in 2006 but did not release anything until 2009. Snce then, it is available on SourceForge.
... to be continued ...
Unfinished/unpublished stuff
My very first software project was not OSS so it never got published. It provided drivers and GUI for a medical
examination system. I can't remember the name of the examination method so i describe it here: There was an D/A and A/D converter.
The D/A converter got connected with an amp to a headphone. The A/D converter was connected via amp to collecting
electrodes attached to the patient's head. The procedure was sending "klicks" on the headphone, measuring the resulting
cerebral activity and displaying it graphically as a function over time. The software was written in Pascal and
Assembler, running on an Apple-II.
My second big software project was a graphical editor for chemical formulas. Not OSS, so never published as well.
It was used in printing industry for typesetting formulas. (Some well-known books have been produced with it: e.g.
"The Beilstein"). It was written in Turbo Pascal and Assembler (the graphics- and keyboard driver) and ran under
MS-DOS 2.11 on a Victor Sirius-I. It interfaced via serial line to a propritary Unix system (first based on PDP-11/34
running Unix System 7, later M68k-based) which in turn merged the formulas into typeset pages and finally exposed the
result on film using a MonoType "Lasercomp". On the unix side, i wrote the typesetting drivers and the spooling system.
(That was the first time i got in touch with Unix). A few years later, the Unix side was replaced by Interactive unix
(predecessor of Solaris-x86) running on ordinary x86 PC's.