Jonni Bidwell gets on the video chat to talk video games and message buses with D-Bus guru Simon McVittie

Jonni Bidwell

Simon McVittie is a Debian developer and a consultant for Cambridge/Canada-based open source-erers Collabora. Last year he was awarded a UK Open Source Award for outstanding contributions to FOSS.

Simon’s in charge of D-Bus which is, among other things, how all the different bits of your desktop talk to one another. He’s also been working with Valve Software on an exciting project named Pressure Vessel that aims to have Steam leverage the magic of containers, to make for a smoother cross-distro experience. And to alleviate the Steam runtime’s current dependency on libraries from eight years ago.

Locked-down Jonni Bidwell took a break from the endless trips between the computer and the snack cupboard (that for nearly four months have been his life), to talk to Simon about interprocess communication mechanisms, gaming and Wine. And also to yabber on about his ancient Eee PC that, despite conventional reasoning, to this day remains alive and well. There’s an allegory about print media here, but let’s not go there and instead listen to Simon’s wisdom and erudition…

Linux Format: I’m told you won a prestigious award at the UK Open Source awards. Bravo. Your colleague Mark Filion told me you were shy about this, but that this recognition is well-deserved. Can you tell me a little bit about the awards?

Simon McVittie: The awards are to recognise companies that are doing good in the open source space - particularly for major projects like LibreOffice - and individual developers. In the case of the latter, people who have established themselves for a while, such as myself, and also students and upcoming developers.

SIMON’S GENEROUS VIEW OF D-BUS “It’s not the fastest, both in terms of latency and throughput, it’s not the most expressive and it’s not even the easiest. But it’s among all those factors that it’s a decent compromise…”

LXF: You’re a Debian contributor, and have been for a while. Can you tell us how that journey started?

SM: I started using Linux back at sixth form, so aged 16 or 17. I started using Debian not long after I got to university. I can’t remember when exactly I started contributing to it - 2002 or 2003 probably. My first job out of university was for a company that was using a lot of Linux stuff for their product, without actually doing any open source themselves. So they were taking a Linux stack and building proprietary software on top of it. While I was there I met one of the founders of Collabora, who jumped ship to found his own consultancy. A year or so later I was getting fed up with that job, so I decided to join him.

LXF: Did you study computer science?

SM: No, Mathematics. I describe myself as a recovering mathematician.

LXF: Me too. High five. One day I hope to be free of the group theory nightmares.

SM: The way of thinking is very useful for programming: being able to think through all the possible results of something, and making sure all the cases are enumerated rather than just saying “it’ll probably be fine”. The actual mathematics I’ve probably only used once since getting my degree. That was to audit someone’s implementation of Shamir’s (the S in RSA cryptography) secret sharing, and to ensure it had the security properties that it claimed.

LXF: Mercifully, I haven’t had cause to use group theory for many years now. There are some really exciting developments connected to algebra and cryptography, but they’re far too complicated for me.