About Me
My name is David A. Desrosiers (no, not that one), and I’m an Open Source developer, hacker, entrepeneur, thinker, productivity enthusiast and father to an amazing and beautiful girl.
I’ve been doing this “Internet thing” for a very, very long time, starting with a BBS system I started running shortly out of high-school in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s on OS/2 Warp, to having a simple shell account on a server at Mindport Internet Services, to heading up the longest-running Linux User Group in New England (still to this day), to all of the fun things I do every day in the present.
I’ve done a thousand different things in my life, but for the last 20+ years, my life has been entirely focused on Open Source, Linux and new and innovative solutions to problems.
I’ve been “blogging” since about 1999, on a site called Advogato, back before they called these things “blogs”, they used to be called “web diaries”, and many of us geeks got together and would post about our accomplishments, hacks, tricks, workarounds and anything else we stumbled upon that helped us or others along the way.
Advogato has a very neat “trust metric” that they employ to allow peer review of the posted entries, articles and content. It was through this trust metric that I quickly rose to “Master” status.
I needed a way to provide richer content on my articles, so I decided to transfer my content over to WordPress, and self-host my own blog. Now I host about 2-dozen blogs for myself and others, along with about 100 other random websites that I contribute to, maintain, design, or host for other developers or clients.
I started a small company, “gnu-designs, inc.” as a means to provide Open Source projects visibility on the web, when they had no way to host their own services, revision control, bug tracking, mailing lists and other facilities. I would provide these to those projects, gratis, so they could have a public space to share their creations.
Others saw my work and wanted to get hosted as well, so I created “SourceFubar.Net“, as a vehicle to do that. SourceFubar stated as a tongue-in-cheek poke at SourceForge, because they couldn’t get their services working right without hacking the useful bits out of them and adding significant proprietary code to the backend. SourceFubar stated and still maintains a 100% free and open Open Source foundation, uncrippled.
But SourceFubar had one caveat: I would only design and host Open Source projects for free. Any project or client that was making a profit, or money from their site, would have to compensate me in some way. Either they paid me for the hosting on a monthly basis, or their site would have subtle, aesthetic banners inserted on their pages to help drive revenue back to pay for power, bandwidth, backups, and so on.
It worked well, until the bottom fell out of the economy, and clients decided they weren’t going to pay anymore, and banner ad revnue was falling fast, no longer covering the costs of hosting those sites.
Fast-forward to the present, and here we are. I’m still hacking on a number of Open Source projects (pilot-link, Plucker, WordPress, and others), kickstarting a handful of entrepeneurial ideas and learning and growing more and more every day.
I hope your stay here is engaging and lively; there’s a lot of useful content to be found, read and enjoyed here on my blog, as well as linked from here to other sites.
Enjoy!