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Interview collabora
Meeting Mr Productivity
We travelled to the Collabora offices in Cambridge to visit Michael Meeks, a veteran open source advocate and developer
M
eeks is a mild-mannered heavyweight of the open source world, who has worked tirelessly for the GNOME project for many years and was an early employee of Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza (one of the founders of the GNOME project) when they set up Ximian to develop the Ximian Desktop. We interviewed Meeks in Collabora’s Cambridge offices. For Meeks, Collabora is the culmination of a number of moves in the open source software business which saw him join Novell when Ximian was acquired in 2003, and work at SUSE until Collabora was formed.
Michael Meeks
Michael is general manager at Collabora Productivity, part of Collabora, an open source consulting business that supports many projects including LibreOffice, Linux kernel, Wayland and more.
Tell us about your background and how you got into open source… Sure. My mother taught me to program when I was very small, which was fun. It was a BBC Micro and I got really into it. I loved to write games. In my gap year I became a Christian, and it turned out that all the games I was writing used stolen compilers and stolen operating systems. It was all a bit risqué. So in the end, I switched to using this Linux thing, which at the time was absolutely terrible. It literally killed my hard disk the first time I installed [it]. There were no graphics worth using. There was no way you could be writing games.
Above Michael Meeks has come a long way from writing games on the BBC Micro
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Tell us more about what you were doing on the GNOME side of things. My first contribution was for GCC [the GNU Compiler Collection]. I was just irritated that there was a sort of undefined behaviour thing happening but the compiler wouldn’t tell you this. You turn all warnings on and nothing would go, ‘Hey wait a minute, this could do almost anything.’ So I implemented a patch for this; sent it to the GCC people; and I didn’t get a reply for like two years. Two years later, I got a thing saying, ‘Oh, I was looking into fixing this. I discovered there’s a patch on the mailing list that does exactly this. There’s really no problems with it. So I just fixed up the help and merged it’, so that was not really a very good validation of the model. So I moved on. I installed GNOME, and I started playing with a Mahjong game, making it solvable and so on. And then I got into Gnumeric with Miguel [de Icaza] and hacked a lot on that, doing file-format reverse engineering. The first Excel filter is really open source – we could grab binary files and import them. And then the export filters were even more exciting, because it was before security became an issue for Microsoft, so there was no real auditing or fuzzing on their filters. The typical export test was: look at the diff to their file [which prints the lines that are different] and then try to reduce it, and see if it crashes when it loads in Excel and see if it crashes after playing with it for a while. Because often you’d corrupt the heap, or something really bad would happen and subsequently you would crash – caused by your bad file format. So yeah, there were all sorts of horrors under the hood. The world has got much more secure in recent times. Now it tends to crash on import or tolerate bad input much better than it did in Microsoft Word and, of course, LibreOffice too. So going back to being founded out from SUSE, which part or projects do you cover? Collabora Office and Collabora Online? Collabora Productivity does LibreOffice-based stuff, essentially. So we have Collabora Online [an online productivity suite], we have Collabora Office [a Microsoft Office alternative]. We have a few other things around that can lead to the various bits of those products. But essentially everything