Michael Meeks (software developer)

{{short description|British software developer}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2018}}

{{Use British English|date=April 2018}}

{{BLP sources|date=January 2011}}

{{Infobox person

|name = Michael Meeks

|image = Michael Meeks at the OpenOffice.org conference 2007 in Barcelona, Spain--2007-09.jpg

|caption = Michael Meeks at the OpenOffice.org conference 2007 in Barcelona, Spain

|nationality = British

|birth_date =

|birth_place =

|callsign = mmeeks

|occupation = Software developer for Collabora

}}

Michael Meeks is a British software developer. He is primarily known for his work on GNOME, OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice{{Citation needed|date=April 2014}}. He has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a long time working on its infrastructure and associated applications, particularly CORBA, Bonobo, Nautilus and GNOME accessibility.{{cite web|url=http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/184 |title=Meek not geek — Interview with Michael Meeks of OpenOffice.org |last=James |first=Daniel |date=2007-05-07 |work=Tux Deluxe |publisher=Frank Pohlmann |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20100726043154/http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/184 |archivedate=2010-07-26 |url-status=dead }} He has worked at Novell, SuSE and then Collabora.{{cite web|url=https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-09-03-collabora.html|title=Collabora and LibreOffice|date=3 September 2013|accessdate=1 October 2013|first=Michael|last=Meeks|work=Stuff Michael Meeks is doing (blog)}}

Meeks is a free software hacker who has contributed a lot of time to decreasing program load time.{{cite web | url = https://lwn.net/Articles/192624 | last1 = Moser | first1 = John Richard | date = 2006 | title = Optimizing Linker Load Times}} He created the direct binding, hashvals, and dynsort implementations for GNU Binutils and glibc. Most of this work was focused at making OpenOffice.org and now its fork LibreOffice start faster, and was later subsumed into the "-hash-style=gnu" linking optimization.

He supports LibreOffice and Evolution as the free software solutions for document editing and groupware.{{cite web|url=http://www.zdnetasia.com/oss-recommended-picks-for-business-users-62205320.htm |title=OSS recommended picks for business users |last=Kwang |first=Kevin |date=2010-12-23 |work=ZDNet |publisher=CBS Interactive |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20101231221756/http://www.zdnetasia.com/oss-recommended-picks-for-business-users-62205320.htm |archivedate=2010-12-31 |url-status=dead }}

Meeks is a Christian, which he says made him think about the moral aspects of his own illegal use of non-free software and converted him finally to free software.