Carsten Haitzler, also known as Rasterman, has been described as “one of the few genuine legends in the Linux community”. He is the leader and founder of the open source project Enlightenment, a window manager for Linux which is now used in millions of products around the world, including cameras, phones, Samsung smartwatches, smart TVs and even fridges.

He’s travelled the world working on Linux and graphics, for a whole host of companies including Red Hat and Samsung. He is currently a director of open source software at Arm.

In this interview we talk about how he started Enlightenment, motivation for learning leading an open source project and open source in a commercial context, and how Carsten initially failed his C programming module at university.