Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh is an Australian free software and open source software engineer. He is known for his past prominence in the GNOME and Ubuntu projects and communities.

Career

In 2004, Waugh was hired by Mark Shuttleworth as an early employee of Canonical Ltd. and member of the Ubuntu project, where he worked in business development. At O'Reilly [Open Source Convention|OSCON] in 2005, Waugh won "Best Evangelist" in the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards for his evangelism of Ubuntu and GNOME. He announced his resignation from Canonical in July 2006 to focus more fully on his work in the GNOME project.
From 2007 Waugh and then-wife Pia Waugh were co-directors of Waugh Partners, an Australian Open Source consultancy launched in 2006. Waugh Partners won the 2007 NSW State Pearcey Award for Young Achievers for their work promoting Free Software to the Australian ICT industry. In 2008 Waugh was a partner of the One Laptop Per Child Australia program. In 2008 Pia Waugh moved to a new career; Waugh's later employers have included Bulletproof Networks and Kounta.

Positions

Waugh has served in a number of formal and semi-formal positions in Free Software development and community projects:

Director, Open Source Industry Australia, 2008
Director, the GNOME Foundation board, 2003–2004 and 2006–2008
Member of the linux.conf.au 2007 organising team
Chairman of the Annodex Foundation 2005–2006
GNOME release manager 2001–2005
President of the Sydney Linux Users Group, 2002–2003
Member of the committee of the Sydney Linux Users Group, 2000–2002.
Member of the linux.conf.au 2001 organising team

Other development projects

Waugh is an author of the Python feed aggregator Planet.

Personal life

Waugh was married to fellow open-source advocate and community leader Pia Waugh until 2011. He wrote on his blog in September 2011, on the occasion of RUOK? Day, that he had been struggling with depression since his late teens, and that it had been a contributing factor to the divorce, but that he felt he had overcome it.