For the past 6 years I have been working on several open source projects as a volunteer. But it has been difficult to find the time to continue to do so on a regular basis after my son was born, in August 2009. There are only 24 hours in a day, and these are not enough to care for the baby, continue my work on Tabuleiro (my small commercial software development company), keep in touch with my friends and family and still make meaningful contributions to KDE and other projects.

During my years with Tabuleiro I accumulated a good deal of experience working with multimedia technology for Windows/OSX, and recently I even managed to convince the bulk of my multimedia customers to do LGPL or GPL projects using Qt as well. But a full transition from closed source to the open source development model was always at my mind. At last Akademy I could witness the number of new companies working strictly with open source projects, most of them leveraging Qt as the main development toolkit, and being able to generate revenue for its developers and maintain a healthy relationship with the community.

And then I realized that I really wanted to work full time on open-source development, after 15 years doing commercial software. This was an easy realization: I did not want to cut on the time spent with my son or with my friends, so changing my work was the only other possible solution 🙂

A few weeks ago the opportunity arrived. I am happy to say that I am now working for Collabora Multimedia on a Qt-based project that I hope will be very useful to Meego and KDE. It is really, really cool. But this is the subject of another post…. For now I just want to say that I am loving the opportunity to work with some of my KDE friends at the same company on a daily basis, as well as having the chance to meet several new developers with different backgrounds.