Collabora

Robert McQueen cofounded Collabora, Ltd. after graduating from University of Cambridge. Rob is a past contributor to Gaim, DBus, Debian, and several other open source projects. He conceived and architected Telepathy and directs its development.

In his day-to-day work at Collabora, Rob advises clients and manages Collabora's consulting and R&D projects. He also makes time to speak at conferences and generally advocate open source techniques and principles. As a longtime open source developer and user, Rob is proud of Collabora's role in the open source community, and believes that open source is the best way to develop software, both commercially and technically.

Philippe Kalaf graduated from Ecole polytechnique de Montréal (Université de Montréal), and went on to partner with Robert McQueen to direct Collabora operations. In addition to this role, Philippe is the founder and designer for the Farstream audio/video conferencing framework.

Having spent much of his career in open source, Philippe is excited to see that the industry is showing more and more interest in open source software and open source software developers, as it allows Collabora to share its knowledge with more traditional programmers. He sees Collabora growing as the industry recognises that open source offers a massive improvement in the software development process. Philippe's ambitions are not just for Collabora, though; he feels that ‘the more we grow, the more open source hackers we can put on the payroll to just do open source software’.

Wim Taymans graduated as a computer science graduate of the Katholieke Universteit in Leuven, Belgium, but had joined the information technology world at an even younger age, having developed commercial games for the Commodore 64. He was also an active developer on the Commodore Amiga before getting involved in PC architecture and the Linux operating system. In 1999 he joined and co-founded the GStreamer multimedia framework, which aimed at closing the multimedia gap seen on open source operating systems as that time. In 2007, along with the 3 other established GStreamer developers, he co-founded Collabora Multimedia.

Today Wim focuses on maintaining and extending the core of GStreamer, often assisting our customers with design advice and problem solving. Wim has also contributed to a wide range of other systems as part of developing GStreamer, including glib, pulseaudio and the ALSA sound system.

Tim-Philipp Müller is a native of Hamburg, Germany and joined the University of Hamburg, before doing further studies and degrees at the University of York and University of Wales Aberystwyth. Towards the end of his studies, he got interested in GStreamer and multimedia development, wanting to write an audio player. He quickly became one of the most prolific contributors to key elements of the GStreamer stack, often taking on the role of ensuring that contributed elements and code reached production level quality.

In his day-to-day work at Collabora Multimedia, Tim often integrates GStreamer into applications and devices, and thus (for example) is a co-maintainer of the popular Totem media player on the Linux desktop.

Edward Hervey is a graduate of the EPITECH engineering school in Paris. As part of his final year project there, he started writing the PiTiVI video editor and, through that, got involved with developing the GStreamer framework to meet the requirements of a video editor. Since then Edward has been a major contributor to the GStreamer framework, including becoming the maintainer of the official Python bindings for GStreamer.

Today Edward splits his time between low-level development on the GStreamer framework and managing our PiTiVi development team.

Christian F.K. Schaller is a Norwegian national and graduate of the BI School of Management in Oslo. He got involved with the open source community as a result of worrying about a trend towards a very high concentration of market power when Netware started fading out in the early nineties. Christian ended up working on Linux-based solutions a short while later in his work as a consultant for Oracle. Being a longtime member of the GNOME and GStreamer development communities, he has also served on the GNOME Board of Directors, and has been advocating for open source multimedia for several years.

As part of his work at Collabora Multimedia, he works on interacting with our customers and searching for new opportunities for our technologies.