Linus Benedict Torvalds ; born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Linux kernel. He now acts as the project's coordinator. Linus was inspired by Minix (an operating system developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) to develop a capable Unix-like operating system that could be run on a PC. Linux now also runs on many other architectures.

Andrew Keith Paul Morton (born 1959 in England) is an Australian software engineer, best known as one of the lead developers on the Linux kernel project. He currently maintains a patchset known as the "mm" tree, which contains not yet sufficiently tested patches that might later be accepted into the official 2.6 kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds. In the late 1980s, he was one of the partners of a company in Sydney, …

Alan Cox (born 1968) is a British computer programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991).

Hans Peter Anvin (born on 12 January 1972) is a computer programmer, Linux kernel hacker, and author and contributor of several other free software projects.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel hacker. He is the current Linux kernel maintainer for the PCI, USB, I²C, driver core and the sysfs kernel subsystems, along with contributing to the kobject, kref and debugfs code. He is also the maintainer of the linux-hotplug and udev projects. Additionally, he maintains the Gentoo Linux packages for these programs, and helps with the kernel package. He works for SUSE Labs. He is a co-author of "Linux Device Drivers, …

Adrian Bunk is a Linux Kernel developer. Since August 2006 he is the maintainer of the 2.6.16 Linux Kernel. The 2.6.16 kernel is the base for a stable series (2.6.16.y), which follows development rules similar to the 2.4 stable branch. Adrian Bunk is also a former contributor to the Debian Project, from which he retired in January 2002.

David S. Miller is one of the core developers working on the Linux kernel, where he is the primary maintainer of the TCP implementation, and is also involved in other development work.

Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 1963) is an American computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community in the field of file systems. In particular he is deeply involved in the Linux kernel development with his widespread ReiserFS journaling file system and its successor Reiser4. In 1997 Reiser founded and has since headed Namesys Inc., …

Robert Matthew Love (born September 25, 1981) is an American author, speaker, and open source software developer. He is best known as a Linux kernel hacker, due to his contributions to the Linux kernel, with notable work including the preemptive kernel, process scheduler, kernel event layer, virtual memory subsystem, and inotify. Love is also active in the GNOME community, working on NetworkManager, GNOME Volume Manager, Project Utopia and Beagle.

Jens Axboe is a Linux kernel hacker. He is the current Linux kernel maintainer of the block layer and other block devices, along with contributing the CFQ I/O scheduler and splice (system call) IO architecture. Jens is also the author of the blktrace utility and kernel parts, which provides a way to trace every block IO activity in the Linux kernel. blktrace exists in 2.6.17 and later linux kernels.

Russell King is the maintainer of the ARM architecture in the Linux Kernel. He did the original porting of the Linux kernel to that architecture and has since maintained and kept the code in sync.

Harald Welte (born in 1979) is a programmer, living in Berlin, Germany. Within the free software community, Welte is well known as a hacker of the Linux kernel and for his activities in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL), the license that governs the use of much of free software. Welte is also involved in Openmoko, a Linux version for low-cost, high-volume phones such as the Neo1973.

Miguel de Icaza (born c. 1972) is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects. Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his father was a physicist and his mother a biologist. He started writing free software in 1992.

Marcelo Wormsbecker Tosatti is a Linux kernel developer. He became the maintainer of the stable 2.4 kernel series in November 2001 when he was 18 years old, releasing 2.4.16 on November 26, and ultimately passed on maintainership for the 2.4 kernel series to Willy Tarreau on July 27 2006 following the release of 2.4.33-rc3. He was brought up in Curitiba, Brazil and worked for Conectiva for six years, during which time he became involved in kernel programming.

Theodore Y. "Ted" Ts'o (born 1968) is a software developer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems. He graduated in 1990 from MIT with a degree in Computing science. After graduation he worked in the "Information Systems & Technology" (IS&T) department at MIT until 1999, where among other things he was project leader of the Kerberos V5 team. After IS&T he went to work for VA Linux Systems for two years.

Ben Collins is a former NASA engineer and was the Debian Project Leader from April 2001 to April 2002. He was succeeded in that role by Bdale Garbee. He currently works for Canonical Ltd. as the Linux kernel team leader for Ubuntu. He is married with 3 sons.

Con Kolivas (born in Melbourne, Australia) is a practicing doctor in Australia. He wrote a benchmarking tool called ConTest which has proven to be tremendously useful to kernel developers, as it compares the performance of different versions of the Linux kernel. He is also known for writing a popular series of Linux kernel patches designed to improve desktop responsiveness through redesigned schedulers and virtual memory managers.

Larry McVoy (b. 1962 in Concord, Massachusetts) is the CEO of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper, a version control system that was used from February 2002 to early 2005 to manage the source code of the Linux kernel. He earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Science in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin and has done stints at Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Google.

Richard Gooch is a Linux kernel hacker and was the original author of the DevFS device filesystem used by Linux (now replaced by udev) as well as numerous other kernel patches.

Dr Stephen C. Tweedie is a software developer who is known for his work on the Linux kernel, in particular his work on filesystems. After becoming involved with the development of the ext2 filesystem working on performance issues, he lead the development of the ext3 filesystem which involved adding a journaling layer to the ext2 filesystem. For his work on the journaling layer, he has been described by fellow Linux developer Andrew Morton as "a true artisan".

Peter MacDonald co-developed early features of the Linux kernel, including shared libraries, pseudo-ttys and virtual consoles. He also created the first comprehensive Linux distribution, Softlanding Linux System, and is the author of the Tcl Web Browser BrowseX.

Richard Purdie is a Free Software and Linux Kernel developer. Being a part of the Openembedded developer team his main focus lies in the adaption of the Linux Kernel for handheld machines. The machines were he has put considerable effort in maintaining and porting is Sharp Zaurus. References http://www.openembedded.org/repo/org.openembedded.dev/MAINTAINERS http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/lxr/source/MAINTAINERS

Jörg Schilling is a computer programmer known especially for his work on compact disc burning software and as an advocate of Solaris and OpenSolaris. Born in Berlin in 1956, he trained originally as an electrical engineer at the Technical University of Berlin.

Ari Lemmke (born December 12, 1963) is the person who gave Linux its name. Linus Torvalds had planned to have it named "Freax" (a combination of 'free', 'freak', and the letter X to indicate a Unix-like system). Ari encouraged him to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded. Ari, however, not happy with the Freax name, gave Linus a directory called "linux" on his FTP server (ftp://ftp.funet.fi/) in September 1991.

Jeff Vernon Merkey is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. After working as chief scientist for Novell, Merkey left to create his own company, Wolf Mountain Group, to develop a set of clustering technologies. Later renamed Timpanogas Research Group (or simply TRG), Merkey and his company were sued by Novell, alleging misappropriation of trade secrets. When the legal battle with Novell ended, TRG announced its intention to develop an open source, …

Chip Salzenberg is an American programmer mostly noted for his involvement in the Perl and Free Software communities. Salzenberg has been involved with Perl development for over 15 years, and with Free Software for more than 20 years. In 1996 and 1997, he was project manager for Perl 5.004, a Perl release widely praised for its high quality. Salzenberg went on to teach Perl and write professionally. He was one of the founding board members of the Open Source Initiative, …

Matt Dillon is a computer scientist, born July 1, 1966 in the Bay Area and living in Berkeley, California. He is best known for his contributions to FreeBSD and for starting the DragonFly BSD project. Dillon studied electronic engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he first became involved with BSD in 1985. He also became known for his Amiga programming, his C compiler DICE and his work on the Linux kernel.

Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the Objective Caml system. He is senior scientist ("directeur de recherche") at the French government research institution INRIA. Leroy was admitted to the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1987, where he studied mathematics and computer science. From 1989 to 1992 he did his PhD in computer science under the supervision of Gérard Huet.

Rémy Card is a French software developer who is noted for his contributions to the Linux kernel. He is credited as one of the primary developers of the Extended file system and Second Extended file system for Linux.

Bryce Harrington is a computer programmer who previously worked at Open Source Development Labs and now is employed at Canonical Ltd. as Ubuntu's Xorg maintainer. At OSDL he worked on automated testing of the Linux kernel, NFS, and Cairo. At OSDL he also developed the Crucible test harness. However, he is better known in the open-source community for several programming and writing projects that he has done on his own time.

Vincenzo Ciaglia (1986-08-26 Eboli (SA) -) Italian system programmer. Vincenzo is the creator of Netwosix Linux, a highly-secure Linux distribution, and a long-time student of open source networking and security technologies. Netwosix has been downloaded by more than 60,000 users around the world. Vincenzo has written widely on networking and open source topics for Italian computer magazines and is a regular columnist at Linux-Magazine Italia.

Ingo Molnár, currently employed by Red Hat, is a Hungarian Linux kernel hacker. He is most well-known for his O(1) scheduler in the 2.6.x kernel series, the in-kernel TUX HTTP / FTP server, as well as his work to enhance thread handling. He also wrote a kernel security feature called "Exec Shield", which prevents stack-based buffer overflow exploits in the x86 architecture by disabling the execute permission for the stack.

David Alexander De Horne Rowntree, commonly known as Dave Rowntree, (born 8 May, 1964 in Colchester, England) is best known as the drummer in the band Blur.

Ten plus years of Technical Recruiting and HR Management. Currently recruiting for a variety of positions for Cisco's Chief Development Organization (CDO) to include Leadership Development opportunities in San Jose, CA and software engineering positions in video within our Emerging Markets Technology Group in San Jose and Carlsbad, CA.

Paul E. McKenney is a distinguished engineer at IBM and has worked on SMP, NUMA, and RCU algorithms for longer than he cares to admit (see http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck if you don't believe this). He has recently become quite interested in getting realtime response from mid-range SMP systems.