- Linus Torvalds
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.
- 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.
- Hans Reiser
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., …
- Eric S. Raymond
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.
- Miguel de Icaza
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.
- Larry Wall
Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a programmer, linguist, and author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Wall earned his bachelor's degree from Seattle Pacific University in 1976. Wall is the author of the rn Usenet client and the nearly universally used patch program.
- Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody is a technology writer. He is best known for his book "Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution" (2001). It describes the evolution and significance of the free software and open source movements with many interviews of all the notable hackers.
- Harald Welte
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.
- 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.
- Jeremy Allison
Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Other contributions include the early versions of the pwdump password cracking utility
- 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.
- Andrew Tridgell
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.
- Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert (19 November 1978 -) is an open-source software programmer and the founder of the Drupal CMS. He still heads the Drupal project. He resides in Belgium and as of 2003 he is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Ghent. From 1999-2000 he was the maintainer of the "GNU/Linux WLAN FAQ".
- Georg C. F. Greve
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.
- Rob Enderle
Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group, is a consultant, writer, and widely quoted technical and legal analyst in the information technology industry. Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, the SCO Group, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell are (or have been) among his clients. Enderle has been critical of Apple Computer and Linux, as well as Unix and the open source/free software movements in general.
- 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.
- John Gilmore
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, …
- Ricardo Galli
Ricardo Adolfo Galli Granada, also known as gallir, is doctor of computer science at the University of the Balearic Islands, where he teaches operating system design. He is a well-known speaker for the Free Software Foundation, and is free software activist.
- Scott James Remnant
Scott James Remnant is a free and open source software developer. He is an employee of Canonical Ltd where he works on the Ubuntu Linux distribution and directs development of the distribution as part of the four-person technical board. Scott is particularly notable as the author of the new Upstart system initialization system and the popular Planet weblog aggregation system.
- Martin Michlmayr
Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer and PhD student working on quality and release management in free software both in practice and as a research topic. Michlmayr became a member of the Debian project in 2000 and soon began work as an Application Manager for membership (New Maintainer) applications. He subsequently worked as a member of the Front Desk which coordinates the New Maintainer process.
- Jamie Zawinski
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.
- Federico Heinz
Federico Heinz is a Latin-American programmer and Free Software advocate living in Argentina. He is a co-founder of Fundación Vía Libre, a non-profit organization that promotes the free flow of knowledge, and the use and development of Free Software. He has helped right legislators such a Argentina's Ing. Dragan, Dr. Conde, and Peru's Dr. Villanueva draft and defend legislation demanding the use of Free Software in all areas of public administration, without success.
- Rusty Russell
Paul "Rusty" Russell is an Australian free software programmer and advocate.
- Matt Zimmerman
Matt Zimmerman is a technologist and free software and open source developer. Matt is a well known developer in the Debian project, having occupied a role on the group's security team and maintained the Advanced Packaging Tool (APT). Matt currently works for Canonical Ltd. as the technical leader of the Ubuntu project, chairman of the Ubuntu technical board and CTO of the project.
- Frederick Noronha
Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based independent journalist, co-founder of BytesForAll & active chronicler of ICT4D initiatives in India. He is also founder of indialists.org (a network of alternative mailing lists) and www.goa-india.org (creating space for alternative voices from Goa), and for the past decade he has been a member of the Admin Volunteer Team of Goanet ( www.goanet.org ), Goa's oldest and largest mailing list.
- David A. Wheeler
David A. Wheeler (born 1965) specializes in developing high-risk software systems, particularly large software systems and computer security. He has written a number of articles on open source software and free software.
- Bradley M. Kuhn
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.
- Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim is the author of Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language. He is an advocate of Free Software and Dive into Python is published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Mark Pilgrim was formerly an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group. In March 2007, he started working at Google.
- Loïc Dachary
Loïc Dachary is a pioneer of the GNU Project and notably active in free software development since 1987. He developed the first French search engine, co-founded FSF Europe and FSF France, and is an outspoken supporter of freedom and cooperation for the Free Software Community.
- Ian Jackson
Ian W. Jackson is a long time Free Software author and Debian developer. Jackson wrote dpkg, SAUCE, userv and debbugs. He used to maintain the Linux FAQ. He runs chiark.greenend.org.uk, a popular server, home to PuTTY among other things. Jackson has a PhD from Cambridge University and he currently works for Canonical Ltd; he used to work for nCipher Corporation. He became Debian Project Leader in January 1998. Debian GNU/Linux 2.0 (hamm) was released during this time.
- Robert J. Chassell
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" <sup>[ISBN, Publisher Name and Location Needed]</sup>
- Paul Davis
Paul Davis (formerly aka Paul Barton-Davis) is best known for his work on audio software for the Linux operating system, and for his role as one of the first two programmers at Amazon.com. Davis grew up in the Midlands and in London. After studying molecular biology and biophysics. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1989. He lived in Seattle for seven years, before moving to Philadelphia in 1996.
- Klaus Knopper
Klaus Knopper is a German electrical engineer and Free Software developer. Knopper is the creator of Knoppix and Gnoppix, both well-known live CD Linux distributions. He received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology (in German: "Technische Universität Kaiserslautern"), co-founded LinuxTag (a major European Linux expo) and has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998.
- David Axmark
David Axmark is one of the founders of MySQL AB and a developer of the Free Software database server, MySQL.
- H. Peter Anvin
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.
- Brian Paul
Brian Paul is a computer programmer who wrote and continues to maintain the source code for the Open Source Mesa graphics library. Paul began programming initial source code in August 1993. Mesa is a free software/open source graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms. Though Mesa is not an officially licensed OpenGL implementation, the structure, …
- Greg Stein
Greg Stein (b. March 16, 1967 in Portland, OR), living in Palo Alto, CA, USA, is an engineering manager at Google. He has prior to that worked for Oracle Corporation, E-shop, Microsoft and CollabNet. He has been involved in free software projects like Subversion, WebDAV, Python and several Apache projects. He is also a director and past chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.
- Brian Fox
Brian Fox is a free software programmer. He was the original author, in 1987, of the GNU Bash shell. Fox is also the author of: *The GNU components makeinfo, info, finger, and readline *The BuddyCast peer-to-peer streaming media protocol (with Mel Beckman and Denison Bollay) *Meta-HTML
- Simon Tatham
Simon Tatham (born May 3, 1977) is an English programmer known primarily for creating and maintaining PuTTY, a free software implementation of Telnet and SSH clients for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. He is also well-known for his work on NASM and for his essay, How to Report Bugs Effectively, which many software developers direct users to read before reporting bugs to them. He attended Cambridge University, and currently works at ARM.
- Brad Fitzpatrick
Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980 in Iowa), often seen on the Internet under the nickname bradfitz, is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of many popular free software projects. Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon and majored in computer science and minored in German at the University of Washington in Seattle.