Who is Mike VanderMolen?

[soop]

Ok, as of late (past year or so) I've been keeping an eye on a Freshmeat submitter ... His account on Freshmeat is "WT", and he's submitted various projects as well as an update to each project every month ..

A link to his freshmeat page:

http://freshmeat.net/~mvander/


Now what I'm curious about is who actually is this guy, are his projects reputable, or are they just a lame attempt for him to earn money via google adsense ...

He normally blocks his whois info, but one of his domains wasn't blocked and it points to:

vandermolen@yahoo.com

The reason I ask, is I'm truly starting to get annoyed at people taking advantage of opensource sites to make money off ads, sure if you run the site fine, but stop submitting things just to generate hits, it depreciates the value of the originating site. Now if the tools are valid and he is making changes then I don't see the issue ... but it seems every day this "WT" has an update on freshmeat. If it's reputable it's not the end of the world, but I'm just curious ...

Cheers,


M.

[briancurtin]

how about you continue stalking and setup a fake email address to ask him?

[lordofkhemenu]

I took some time and went through all his apps, read some of the comments, etc.

He appears to be legit. Answered inquiries about the software and bugs (though the last comment was back in 2005 - the topic/subject matter was a legit user concern).
He appears to be using a non-OSS license, but was considering switching at one point:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/recruitment-agency-software/#comment-34087

Anybody else?

[lordofkhemenu]

how about you continue stalking and setup a fake email address to ask him? Hey, now. Look at his forum name - "scoop". He's just digging, trying to get the story like any investigative reporter :p ;)

[Arktis]

Hmm... I say we all form a lynch party. With punch and pie.

[majikstreet]

well, keep stalking him and you'll find out... ok I'll tell you:
He's Mike VanderMolen.