- Richard Stallman
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.
- Eric Sink
Eric Sink is a software developer and writer. He is the author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" (2006), a collection of essays from his blog and the "Business of Software" column for the Microsoft Developer Network. He founded SourceGear, which sells version control software for Microsoft Windows and started the AbiWord project. Before that, he led the browser team at Spyglass.
- James Gosling
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.
- Rory Blyth
Rory Blyth is a famous technology blogger known for his wit and humor. He became famous among Microsoft .NET developers as a co-host to the popular podcast .NET Rocks.
- Steven Frank
Steven Frank is a Macintosh developer and the author of the popular webcomic "Spamusement!" Frank is a co-founder of the software company Panic. He is thought of by his fans as having a stylish haircut and a pipe, from one of his Spamusement strips, Want to go on a cruise on us stevenf?. His family and friends, however, know him to be the wizard painted on the side of the van in Impress the Females
- James Duncan Davidson
James Duncan Davidson is an American software developer. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems (1997–2001), Davidson created the Tomcat Java‐based webserver application and the Ant Java‐based build tool. He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and is currently self‐employed as both a software consultant and a photographer. He is a resident of Portland, Oregon.
- Blake Ross
Blake Aaron Ross (b. June 12, 1985) is a software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla web browser; in particular, he started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, as well as the Spread Firefox project with Asa Dotzler while working as a contractor at the Mozilla Foundation. In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine's top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart.
- Adam Nathan
AdamNathan is a technical author/speaker, and currently works as a software developer at Microsoft. He has been involved with .NET technologies from the beginning, and his 1,600-page book on .NET/COM Interoperability has been popular, especially with Microsoft employees (as seen on Amazon's purchase circle for Microsoft). He also created the PINVOKE.NET wiki, which helps .NET developers use unmanaged APIs.
- John Harris
John(athon) D. Harris is a well-known computer programmer, hacker, and author of some classical 1980s Atari computer games. He features in Steven Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" as one of the young computer hackers working at Sierra On-Line.
- Robert Love
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.
- Jono Bacon
Jono Bacon is a writer and software developer based in the United Kingdom. Bacon started his work with the Linux community when he created the UK Linux website, Linux UK. When he left this project he moved on to join the KDE team, where he created the KDE::Enterprise website and KDE Usability Study. He has also been involved with helping charities using free software, as well as shaving off his beard for Amnesty International at LugRadio Live 2006.
- Jeff Waugh
Jeff Waugh (known as "jdub") is an Australian free software and open source software developer. He is a consultant for Waugh Partners and is very active in the GNOME free software community. He is married to Pia Waugh - another active member of the free software community in Australia.
- Tom Miller
Tom Miller (born in 1950) is a software developer who is employed by Microsoft. Miller worked as a member of the original team of developers who followed Dave Cutler from DEC to Microsoft, where he initially started working in the networking group. After less than two years, Miller moved to the Windows NT team, where he worked with Gary Kimura on file systems. In particular, he wrote the original 50 page specification document for the NT File System.
- David Harris
David Harris (born c. 1962) is a software developer from Dunedin, New Zealand. He developed the Pegasus Mail client and the Mercury Mail Transport System, and is a former staff member of the University of Otago. Prior to working in software, Harris worked as a photographer.
- Ilfak Guilfanov
Ilfak Guilfanov is a software developer, computer security researcher and blogger. He became well known when he issued a free hotfix for the Windows Metafile vulnerability on 31 December 2005. His unofficial patch was favorably reviewed and widely publicized because no official patch was initially available from Microsoft. Microsoft released an official patch on 5 January 2006.
- Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt is an American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc. (since July 15, 2002), where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser and WebKit framework. Hyatt was part of the original team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari. He is currently the Safari and WebKit Architect. Before Apple, Hyatt worked at Netscape Communications from 1997 to 2002 where he contributed to the Mozilla web browser.
- Theodore Ts'O
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.
- Mark Allen
Mark Allen is a software engineer, game programmer and game designer. As a student at the University of California, San Diego, Allen developed a 6502 interpreter for the Pascal language in 1978, along with Richard Gleaves. This work later became the basis for Apple Pascal. Later, Allen developed a number of well-received computer games for the Apple II, including "Stellar Invaders", "Sabotage" and "Pest Patrol".
- Pieter Hintjens
Pieter Hintjens (born December 3, 1962) is a Belgian software developer and president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), an association that fights against software patents. He is also the CEO of iMatix and has written many free software applications, such as Libero and the Xitami web server. Hintjens started the CAPSoff campaign to reform the keyboard, starting with the removal of the Caps Lock key.
- Dave Miller
Dave Miller (born 1972) is an American software developer best known for his work on the Bugzilla bug tracking tool developed at Mozilla.Org. He voluntarily assumed the role of maintainer after the previous maintainer, Tara Hernandez, stepped down. He is currently employed by the Mozilla Corporation. Owing in part to his Bugzilla development experience, Dave is an expert in Perl as well as in databases, including MySQL.
- Mark Lucovsky
Mark Lucovsky is an American software developer who worked for Microsoft and who is now employed by Google. He is noted for being a part of the team that designed and built the Windows NT operating system. Lucovsky received his bachelor's degree in computer science in 1983 from the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. He worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he came to the attention of Dave Cutler and Lou Perazzoli.
- Hartmut Pilch
Hartmut Pilch (born July 7 1963 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) founded the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure or FFII, and is a simultaneous conference interpreter, translator and software developer, who lives in Munich, Germany. He is a former employee of SuSE and former president of the FFII. In 2000, he led a campaign which supposedly contributes to prevent the removal of the exclusion of computer programs as such from patenting in Art.
- Mike Shaver
As a founding member of mozilla.org, Mike has enjoyed a rare opportunity to inflict a wide variety of trials and errors on the Mozilla code and project. He is stronger for it, and hopes that Mozilla is as well. Scheming diabolically from his fortress of solitude in Toronto, shaver meddles in matters ranging from platform architecture and implementation to licensing and organizational development. If you are short on opinions, he often has some to spare.
- Keith Packard
Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s, at the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and presently with the X.Org Foundation. After being expelled from XFree86 after disagreements (which led to the formation of the successful X.Org Server fork), …
- Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson is the member of futurepop duo VNV Nation, along with Ronan Harris. He is responsible for electronic drums, percussion and live keyboards. He is also established as a professional Club DJ and remix artist. Mark originates from Essex, England and worked as a Software developer, programmer and designer for CompuServe, MSN and Microsoft before becoming a full-time musician.
- Stuart Langridge
Stuart Langridge (also known as 'Aq') is a web and software developer based in the United Kingdom. Langridge is the author of two books, DHTML Utopia, and Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache (with Tony Steidler-Dennison) for technical publishers SitePoint. Also for SitePoint, he wrote the Stylish Scripting weblog during 2005. Langridge is a member of the Web Standards Project's DOM Scripting Task Force and is an acknowledged commentator on DOM Scripting techniques.
- Jens Alfke
Jens Alfke is a software developer, who has been employed by Apple Computer since 1991. He is best known for creating the Stickies software application for Mac OS and the iChat application for Mac OS X. He has most recently worked on the Safari RSS team.
- Robert Cailliau
Robert Cailliau (b. 26 January 1947) is one of the co-developers of the World Wide Web.
- Benoit Schillings
Benoit joined Qt Software (originally Trolltech) in October 2005 serving as Chief Technologist responsible for leveraging Qt Software's existing technologies and services in addition to strengthening the company's ability to bring new technologies quickly to market. Mr. Schillings was a principal contributor to the launch of Be Incorporated, where he designed, developed and implemented the technically acclaimed BeOS.
- Ed Miller
Edward Raymond Miller is a professional poker player and an author of books about poker. He wrote "Small Stakes Hold 'em: Winning Big With Expert Play" with David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth in 2004. In 2005, he completed "Getting Started in Hold 'em", a beginner's book. In 2006, he co-wrote "No Limit Hold 'Em: Theory and Practice" with David Sklansky.
- Andre Lamothe
André LaMothe is a Computer Scientist, well-known game programming author and software developer. He is best known for his books written on game programming, and has written numerous computer games for 8-bit computers as well as the "3D Rex-Blade" series in the mid '90s. He also developed one of the first super computer virtual reality location-based games while working at Vision of Reality.
- Werner Koch
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.
- James Atkinson
James Atkinson is the originator of the open source phpBB Internet forum software, which is based on the PHP scripting language. He started it in 2000 because existing forum software choices were limited, and either too expensive or unattractive. phpBB has been constantly developed and improved since then and evolved into a major part of forum software on the internet. James resigned as phpBB project leader April 30th, 2007.
- Scott Werndorfer
Scott Werndorfer (born August 1, 1980) is the co-founder and head developer of Cerulean Studios, a company responsible for creating Trillian, a popular instant messaging client. Werndorfer is a native of Brookfield, Connecticut. He was a network security consultant at Integralis before founding Cerulean Studios. He did not complete college, but instead, used US$ 10,000 of his savings to start Cerulean Studios together with fellow computer programmer Kevin Kurtz.
- John Bridges
John Bridges is the co-author of the software program PCPaint and primary developer of the program GRASP for Microtex Industries with Doug Wolfgram. He is also the sole author of GLPro and AfterGRASP. His article entitled "Differential Image Compression" was published in the February 1991 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal.
- David A. Thomas
David A. Thomas is a well-known figure in modern software development and object technology. Thomas took undergraduate (1969) and graduate (1976) degrees at the Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and held a number of software development positions in the ensuing years. Thomas is perhaps best known as the founder and past CEO of Object Technology International, Inc., now IBM OTI Labs.
- Stephen Tweedie
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".
- Brendan Kehoe
Brendan Patrick Kehoe (born December 3, 1970 in Dublin, Ireland) is a software developer and author. He has written two books as well as technology articles in the specialist press (e.g., in "Boardwatch Magazine") on the topic of the Internet. His first book, "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide" was the first mass-published user's guide to the Internet. On December 31, 1993, he and a friend, Sven Heinicke, …
- Derek Smart
Derek K. Smart is the president and lead developer of 3000AD, Inc., a video game developer based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is an independent video game designer and software developer, and the creator of the "Battlecruiser 3000AD" and "Universal Combat" video game series. A self-described "eccentric and vocal personality", Smart is renowned for lengthy and aggressive online responses to perceived criticism.
- Ian Bird
Ian Bird is a game programmer and game designer. Along with other game credits, Bird wrote the computer games "Millennium 2.2" and "Deuteros".