First week at Impi

I spent the last week in Johannesburg, at the Impi Linux offices, where I’ve been freshly employed. It’s quite exciting, our local government is making a strong move to open source and free software, and Impi Linux is already signed up to do big parts of the migration, and it seems that more and more government departments are switching fast in what seems to be a domino effect. What’s also interesting is to see how government is turning away from vendors who have dodgy policies on patents, although we have good local people to thank for increasing awareness on the patent issues.

Impi Linux have recently been working hard on recruiting good technical staff, and I’m glad to be in a team where I can learn from so much. They also have Thomas Black on board, who initiated the Open Source team at the Shuttleworth Foundation way before Ubuntu even existed, out of which tuXlabs, Freedom Toasters, the Go-Open Source campaign and other interesting projects emerged from. I enjoyed working with Thomas in the past, and I’m looking forward to working with him in the newly formed Cape Town office. They’re also hiring some cool people from all over to work on the new government implementations. If you’re good at what you do, and you want a decent free software job that pays good, consider sending your C.V. to my new boss.

Working with free software in your day job is challenging and rewarding, remember to tell your friends to learn and use GNU/Linux!