OpenGEM > Interviews > Gene Buckle
Some people have to get the ball rolling with open source development projects, and Gene is one of those guys. He helped get the DR GEM code from Caldera, and today he makes sure the development community has their server. He kindly agreed to talk to us...

What do you do in the FreeGEM world?

I host the server.  I'm also the guy that bothered Caldera so much that they finally agreed to release GEM and it's associated products under the GPL.  Credit also goes to Roger Gross, late of the former European Development Center.  We almost got DR-DOS (OpenDOS) released too, but the suits geeked on us.  I still have a CD with the full build tree for what amounts to DR-DOS 7.0.  Poor thing uses 3 different C compilers, 3 or 4 different assemblers and took about 40 minutes to build on a Pentium 200.

When did you start using GEM?

In 1996 when I found out that Caldera had purchased all the DRI assets from Novell.

What do you think about the OpenGEM distribution?

I think it's a great idea.  Bootable CD distros along the lines of Knoppix are a fantastic idea.  What I'd really like to see is some kind of RAD environment or a good GUI builder for OpenGEM.