A humble request for help

[Stefan Görling <stefan gorling se>]

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently working on a thesis investigating how Open Source is 
affected by the influence of money and the interests of commercial 
companies. As the GNOME Desktop efforts is the foundation of many 
companies it is interesting to study how their entrance to the scene 
have affected the community.

The thesis as well as research papers surrounding it will be released 
under the GNU Free Documentation License and as soon as the first drafts 
are available they will be published so that the community may comment 
upon it.

In order to improve the research, it would be great if you guys could 
spend a few minutes on this one. I have included below a list of the 
most active persons on this mailinglist during the year 2002. I have 
tried to establish their employer as far as e-mail adresses and google 
could help me out, but there are lots of unknowns, and probably some 
errors too. So please, send me patches.

Also, if you belive that there are others who should be on this list, or 
someone who shouldn't please let me know.

If there are someone out there who would be willing to answer some more 
detailed questions, such as how long they've been doing Open Source 
development as a source of income and how they think it have affected 
them and their efforts, please drop me a line. I'd be forever grateful. 
I am also very interested in interviewing developers who are major 
contributors on their free-time.

Havoc Pennington,RedHat
Elliot Lee,RedHat
Michael Meeks,Ximian
Sean Middleditch,Unknown / Self-financed
Ali Akcaagac,Unknown / Self-financed
Cristiano De Michele,Unknown / Self-financed
James Henstridge,Unknown / Self-financed
Sergey V. Udaltsov,Unknown / Self-financed
Sander Vesik,Sun Microsystems
Philip Van Hoof,Unknown / Self-financed
Shane W. Clancy,Logicon?
Kjartan Maraas,Unknown / Self-financed
Malcolm Tredinnick,Unknown / Self-financed
Jacob Berkman,Ximian
Miguel De Icaza,Ximian
Owen Taylor,RedHat
Martin Sevior,Unknown / Self-financed
Michael Honeyfield,Unknown / Self-financed
Allin Cottrell,Unknown / Self-financed
David Moles,Unknown / Self-financed
Franck Martin,Unknown / Self-financed
Thomas Vander Stichele,Unknown / Self-financed
Mikael Hallendal,CodeFactory
Biswapesh Chattopadhyay,Unknown / Self-financed

Best Regards,

Stefan Görling