Linux Format Tell us a little about yourself, Peter.
Peter Zaitsev I’m now the founder of a few companies in the open source space, Percona being the largest and the most well known of those. I’m also very active in the open source ecosystem. I’m originally from Russia and now live in the US, North Carolina. I also lived for a bit in London and that’s actually where Percona got started back in 2006.
LXF What are your first memories of using a computer?
PZ I got my first computer from a trash can. At the time I was staying for a year in Sweden, my dad was a professor at a university. I think some local company was refreshing their computers, and throwing away perfectly good IBMs. So it had a monochrome display and half a MB of RAM, which I got to use.
That was a fantastic experience, because you don’t have the latest and greatest stuff. It’s kind of slow and you don’t have the resources – you have to figure things out, how to make things work that are not supposed to work, and I think that was wonderful. Comparing that to my own computer right now, you have this wonderful PC with a powerful graphics card. You can run all these fancy games. Why would you want to learn assembly language?
My involvement with open source is interesting. My start was back in Russia when I was 19. I was in university at that time and came to the choice of software to use. It was an interesting time, because open source software was not what it is right now. If you think about the late ’90s, Linux and all that kind of stuff was just starting. It was kind of a joke. It was very cool
