Let’s go Sun for no more sun.

I have bad news and good news. The bad one is I’m leaving the Free Software Office of my university, after almost two years spreading the word of the free software model and values among students and teachers. I’ve enjoyed so much there and I’ve learned so much from the people working with me on the office that I wont be able to express my gratitude ever, thank you all guys.

One of the activities that I enjoyed the much, was organizing talks for students. That was the most easy and obvious way to let people know what the free software is and what does it means. The last talk was given by alo, he talked about the release of Java as free software, his work at Sun Microsystems and the great http server Cherokee. While having a lunch with him, he told me about an intern guy that was working with him in the desktop team at that moment I don’t even cared about that issue. But the day after, I asked him for this kind of positions and he explained me that there was internship positions for european students to work on Sun for some months.

So I told myself, working for Sun would be cool, and sent my CV to try. This was two weeks ago, and now, after several phone interviews I have a contract in my hands for a whole year to work in Dublin, Ireland, on their offices (and this is the good news) tomorrow I will send it signed to Sun.

I’m going to (somehow) coordinate the release of APOC (A Point Of Control) as free software, a user configuration management software for big deployments which integrates with GConf, Mozilla and OpenOffice/StarOffice. Sort of what Sabayon+Pessulus does, but with centralized LDAP backends for the apps’ configurations so you can handle hundred of user’s preferences with just few mouse clicks.

I was really interested in the project when I saw the APOC talk at GUADEC. I’ve suffered the problems of configuration management on big deployments since 4 years ago when I implemented thin clients for some of my customers. This was before getting into my college studies and the Free Software Office, then, the problem was even bigger. For universities, tools like this are not only helpful, but must-have. And since it integrates with the GNOME desktop, it’s almost the work of my dreams.

I start on 1st April so I’m going to have a hard month ahead, for instance, in Canary Islands, there’s no need to winter clothes, so I need to go shopping and arrange all the bureaucratic thing.

This is the first time that I’m going to leave home (and country), so, is a really serious change for me: no more mom’s food, no more quite weather, no more Spanish. On the other hand, this is the first time that I have a real opportunity to work on a big company (and doing free software!), so I won’t waste it, I want to give my best and learn as much as possible (even Java!), probably, the most exciting thing on my life since I passed my first college exam.

I’ll keep up posting about my life in Dublin and my work at Sun soon, so stay tuned.

PS: alo, thank you very much.