I DREAM OF GSTREAMER
Olivier Crête leads Collabora’s multimedia team and has been working on GStreamer since 2007. As far as we know, this is the only Linux software to reference the classic western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in its package naming scheme (look it up). Olivier has also worked for the Gentoo project for the best part of a decade, which we found odd because other than that he seemed pretty normal.
He was good enough to share some of his erudition with Jonni the one time we let him out last year to attend the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Edinburgh. Check out Olivier’s ‘GStreamer for Tiny Devices’ talk from the same conference a year earlier at http://bit.ly/lxf255gstreamer1 .
Olivier is also a veteran of instant messaging, having worked on GnomeICU – which some of our more seasoned readers will no doubt remember. Now that we’ve got you all nostalgic about IM clients gone by, cheer up and hear about the future: PipeWire, GStreamer and royalty-free codecs.
Linux Format: How long have you been at Collabora – are you one of the old-school people there?
Olivier Crête: I’ve been there for 12 years now, so a little longer than Daniel. I was employee number six and there are now only two people left who’ve been there longer than I have. And there are over a hundred Collaborans now. When I was in university I maintained Gnome ICU – it was an ICQ client. Philippe, the co-founder of Collabora, was working on aMSN. So that’s how we met: we were both doing IM clients for different protocols and we ended up collaborating on system tray icons for these.
Later, he started Collabora and a year later he calls me up and says “Hey, are you looking for a job?”. I was super happy. He remembered I had all this instant-messaging experience and at that time that was most of Collabora’s business. So I signed
