Richard Stallman is the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. Builder AU recently caught up with RMS about his achievements, the Free Software movement and his concerns with the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement. He will be in Australia on October 5 to speak at the Builder Conference in Sydney.

Jamie W. Zawinski (born November 3, 1968 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), commonly known as jwz, is a computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the proprietary Netscape Navigator web browser. He still actively maintains the XScreenSaver project, used by most open source Unix-like operating systems for screenblanking.

James Gosling is a VP & Fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of Unix, several compilers, mail systems ,and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing editor, and a text editor called "Emacs" for Unix systems. At Sun, his early activity was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system.

Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is a computer programmer, author and advocate for the open source movement. His reputation within hacker culture was established when he became the maintainer of the "Jargon File". After the 1997 publication of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Raymond became a high-profile representative of the open source movement, and is today one of its most recognized and controversial characters.

Don's father was a Lutheran school teacher and church organist. Don studied piano, and for a brief time organ, through high school. Later as a faculty member of Caltech, he was called upon to be a long-term substitute organist at Faith Lutheran Church in Pasadena, California. He became a member of the American Guild of Organists in 1965, and saw his first Abbott and Sieker organ at that time.

Robert (aka "Bob") Chassell was one of the founding directors of Free Software Foundation (FSF) in 1985. While on the Board of Directors, Chassell was also the treasurer for FSF. He left the FSF to become a full-time speaker on free software topics. Chassell has authored several books including: *"Software Freedom: An Introduction" ^{[ISBN, Publisher Name and Location Needed]}

Thomas Bushnell, BSG is a Gregorian friar, formerly living in Massachusetts and now in southern California. He was the principal architect and developer of GNU Hurd, and maintains several Debian packages. He was known as Michael Bushnell until he became a Gregorian friar.

Eben Moglen is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center, whose client list includes numerous pro bono clients, such as the Free Software Foundation.

Joel Spolsky started his web log, www.joelonsoftware.com, in March 2000 in order to offer his insights, based on years of experience, on how to improve the world of programming. His extraordinary writing skills, technical knowledge, and caustic wit have made him a programming guru. This log, now legend in the programming world, is linked to more than 600 other websites and translated into more than 30 languages!

Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin) is the chair of Opsware, a software company, and cofounder of Ning, a consumer Internet company. He is best known as a cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser. In 2005, it was revealed that he is one of the people behind Ning, which recently launched a free "playground" for social software.

Bradley M. Kuhn (born in 1973) is a free software activist from the United States. Kuhn is currently the CTO of Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and president of the Software Freedom Conservancy. He previously served the Executive Director of Free Software Foundation (FSF) from 2001 until March 2005.

Georg C. F. Greve (born March 10, 1973 in Helgoland, Germany) is initiator and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. His responsibilities include European/Global coordination and planning for the FSF (Europe), supporting the local representatives in their work, working on political and legal issues as well as projects and giving speeches or informing journalists to spread knowledge about Free Software.

Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer, known primarily for his science fiction works in the postcyberpunk genre with a penchant for explorations of society, mathematics, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as "Wired Magazine", and has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system.

Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a hacker and activist in the free software movement, environmentalist, artist, poet, and gardener. An Eagle Scout, Tower was also awarded the Vigil Honor in the Order of the Arrow. In 1971, he received a B.S. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he held several management roles at "The Tech," the student newspaper, …

Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell (born February 28, 1967) is an Australian computer programmer best known as the creator of and contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm. He is known for his analysis of complex proprietary protocols and algorithms, to allow compatible free software implementations.

Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is currently a Red Hat Desktop manager/engineer, but his fame in the FLOSS world is largely due to his work on GNOME, Metacity, GConf, D-BUS, and more. Before his Red Hat position he was one of the main developers of Debian GNU/Linux. He also founded freedesktop.org in 2000. More recently, Havoc has led the development of the Mugshot project. Pennington is a 1998 graduate of the University of Chicago.

Werner Koch is a German free software author. He is best known as the principal author of the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG). He is also Head of Office and German Vice-Chancellor of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He lives near Düsseldorf, Germany.

Marcus Brinkmann (*25 August 1975 in Dortmund, Germany) is one of the lead developers of the microkernel Hurd/L4 which is supposed to supersede the GNU Mach microkernel in the GNU Hurd operation system. He also initiated Debian GNU/Hurd to push forward the development of GNU Hurd. He is currently studying mathematics at the Ruhr University in Bochum.

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project. As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and founder of Cygnus Support, he accumulated sufficient wealth to take an early retirement and pursue other interests. He is a frequent contributor to free software, and worked on several GNU projects, …

Paco has 25 years experience in software R&D. He holds a BS in Math Sciences and MS in Computer Science from Stanford, worked at NASA/Ames, Bell Labs, Motorola, and has focused on early stage tech start-ups for several years. Among those, Paco co-founded FringeWare in 1992, one of the early ecommerce firms. He's written for several periodicals, including Wired , O'Reilly Network , bOING-bOING , Mondo 2000 .

Software developer on Linux and Windows; system administrator of GNU/Linux, other Unix and Windows; network designer and manager. Interested in all expects of computer industry.

Since I would rather create software from requirements than from other existing software, I love developing for research organizations. The software I create is correct, efficient, useful, maintainable, elegant, readable and timely. I care deeply about software quality, and I take it personally. I design and develop for the full life cycle of systems having stringent requirements for reliability and performance, and operating in geographically distributed, real-time or embedded environments.

Programmer by both day and night, coding in C, C++, D and Python. Interested in science-fiction, regular fiction and great diverse music (from Jefferson Airplane to the Doors to Cursive to Harvey Danger)