The story of Julian Assange and Wikileaks has been pretty much the top of the news lately, so when I got a phone call from Andrew Crook of Crikey, I thought to ask my opinion. But no, it seems I had a connection to Julian: at the hearing after his arrest, he gave his address as 177 Grattan Street, Parkville (Melbourne). In fact, it's in Carlton, and that's where I lived as a child.
Of course, the time difference makes any connection via the house impossible. We moved out 12 years before Julian was born. But after getting another call from Reid Sexton of The Age, I went checking. After all, he did have some computer connections.
To my surprise, it seems that Julian is a BSD person, and that he was quite active on the FreeBSD and (especially) NetBSD mailing lists up to about 10 years ago. I even had an invitation to meet up in Melbourne on 20 October 2000, but unfortunately I was in the USA at the time.
He's well-known elsewhere, including in the Linux world, where I heard of nntpcache, which is also in the FreeBSD Ports Collection and NetBSD pkgsrc, though the collected messages I have suggest that he was more of an advocate than a coder.
It seems that Julian doesn't have much time for Linux, to judge by some of the comments in the NetBSD fortune datfiles:
NetBSD - free yourself from all Stallmanist thought!
-- Julian Assange
%
NetBSD - the cathedral versus the bizarre.
-- Julian Assange
%
NetBSD - the power to swerve (penguins, worse than cane toads).
-- Julian Assange
I'm really quite surprised that none of us knew of this earlier.