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Fabounet's interview!

Author ppmt, Saturday 26 April 2008 à 04:45
Comments 0

Note: this article is a translation. You can find its original version written by Rhinopierroce here


Discover the story behind Cairo-Dock developed by Fabounet basing himself on... well just read the interview to find out!


Hello Fabrice, even though your are the main developer could you please tell us about you ?

It is not easy to sum it but I am 28 years old, I graduated from Supaero (ppmt ed: french aeronautic engineer school) in 2003 (so I am now an engineer). I love sciences, any sports where you have to run after a speedy little ball. I also like SF, Hard-Rock and Trance music as well as mountain trekking, mangas and of course Open source software which I discovered 3 years ago.

Can you explain how you took over the project and what your motivation where to carry on developing Cairo-Dock (formerly known as Gnome dock)?

It happened by chance.... I had tried Gnome dock but it was more or less useless and as the other docks didn't appeal to me I kept going back to the Gnome-panel. And then one week-end the weather was bad and I was looking for something to keep me busy... I remembered that dock and told myself that it was a good looking dock that just needed a taskbar and a way to easily add some launchers on it. I had a look and as I am a bit of a perfectionist by the end of the week-end I had more or less changed everything. I could have just added 3 lines of codes but the "algo" part really got me to go all the way.
I proposed my modifications on the Ubuntu-fr forum, which I was following a lot, because I thought it would be great to give back to the community a little bit. Some people who like me where interested to use Gnome-Dock made some propositions and each time I took it as a challenge.
At one point someone asked me if I intended to make a project out of it. I suddenly realised that it was indeed becoming serious. I think the support from everybody on the forum really helped me.

It is soon going to be 1 year since you took over Cairo-Dock, what do you think about the achievements so far?

I think that the power behind the OpenSource community is great! I didn't know what to expect when I first proposed my modifications. I was really pleased by the reactions and this made me realise that this is how every project should be: open, community and users oriented. What pleases me the most I think is to have gathered people from so many different origin around the same project.

Regarding that last point: how are the contributions organised, who participates and is it easy to join the project?

I think you can say that it is very open ! The forum is easy to use and dynamic so everybody can join whether you want to make a proposition, report a bug our just start a discussion in the "cafe" . Also Cairo-Dock can be customised to a great extent so everybody can propose their own themes, applets or translations, etc... Basically if you can type on a keyboard you can be part of it!

What satisfy you the most right now?

To see that the project is expanding beyond the Ubuntu distribution. That it is no longer limited to francophone's countries. That we lost "control" of the project. At the beginning I was answering every questions, now people talk about us on a lot of different forums and people we don't know help each others.

Would you like to add something else?

"Sure. I would like to thank Necropotame for giving us his great web platform ElememtSpeak. Mav for the faultless hosting of the project, and many more but I would forget some and the list would be too long . The best is to have a look at the 'About" panel of the dock. I thank them all once again!

Thanks for your time Fabric and see you all on the forum and the IRC.

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