Hey Scott,
Eric Andreychek is user andreychek here in the forums. He’s been a friend of Virtualmin, Webmin, and Usermin (and Jamie and I) for many years, and a regular contributor on the mailing lists and here in the forums. He’s a Perl and JavaScript developer, as well, and has been involved in Open Source development for quite some time. He was also a very early economic and bugfix contributor to Virtualmin in its infancy, so he’s been around the project almost as long as Jamie and I.
Officially, he is a part-time employee providing support for Virtualmin Professional customers, though he’s also doing some other non-support work with us, and he also takes part on a voluntary basis, as well, as he genuinely enjoys working with Virtualmin and uses it in his own day-to-day work (and we don’t have the budget to keep him on the clock more than he currently is). We trust him with our own servers. He has SVN commit access to several components of Virtualmin, for example, as well as administrative access to most parts of the website.
As we grow, we will be hiring additional folks to help out with support, as well as development. Hopefully, we’ll be able to hire people we’ve known for a long time, as with Eric, because we do not take our role of having “root” on customers servers lightly. The new support module is designed to make this process more secure: in the past, folks who didn’t know how to install a public key would usually just send us a password via email, which is obviously more dangerous. Public keys are the safest way to allow someone access to your server.
If you’d like to get to know Eric a little better before trusting him with access to your systems, but you still need some personal involvement by us, you can still specifically install my public key from the same location it’s always been ( http://software.virtualmin.com/lib/authorized_keys ) and not grant Jamie or Eric access (Jamie’s public key is not posted in public that I’m aware of…not very public, eh?). You’ll see him around the forums and bug tracker most days, though he is only officially working for us a few hours per week.
Also, Eric’s a really nice guy. Much nicer than me, for example. He also does cool and interesting things, like put together low-cost conferences for his local Linux and Open Source users group. You’ll like him once you get to know him.
Anyway, you’re right, I should have mentioned that we’d hired him when we put him on the payroll a few months ago, and intended to, but it was a hectic time (one of the reasons we hired him–I was overwhelmed, and he’s done a great job taking some of that pressure off so I can get new development done, rather than just answering questions all day every day–things like the new website had been stewing for months and never got anywhere close to completion…but now I’m making very steady progress on it, which I know you’ll be happy to know about, since it means a new bug tracker and forums, in particular).
Hope this answers your questions?