- 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.
- 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.
- Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens is a former Debian GNU/Linux Project Leader, the primary author of the Open Source Definition, a founder of Software in the Public Interest, founder and first project leader of the Linux Standard Base project, the initial author of BusyBox, a founder of the UserLinux project, and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Perens also has a book series with Prentice Hall PTR called the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series.
- 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.
- 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.
- Andrew Morton
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, …
- 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.
- Fabrizio Capobianco
Fabrizio Capobianco is CEO of Funambol, the company behind the Funambol mobile open source project. He is a highly regarded expert on open source software as it applies to the consumer mobile email market. He writes a regular blog called Mobile Open Source, which was voted among the 20 best in wireless by FierceWireless readers. He has forged new paths in open source licensing by co-authoring the Honest Public License (HPL), …
- Sam Ruby
Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the popular Feed Validator web service. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group of IBM. He resides in Raleigh, North Carolina.
- Eric von Hippel
Eric von Hippel is the T Wilson Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known for his pioneering research into the emerging view that users are at the center of the innovation process, rather than manufacturers. In his most recent book, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press / April 2005), von Hippel shows how communities of users are becoming powerful innovation "engines."
- 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.
- Michael Meeks
Michael Meeks is an open source software hacker who has contributed a lot of time to decreasing program load time. He created the direct binding, hashvals, and dynsort implementations for GNU binutils and glibc. Most of this work seems to be focused at making OpenOffice.org start faster. Michael Meeks serves as one of the Distinguished Engineers in Novell - http://www.novell.com/company/bios/des.html
- Julian Lombardi
Julian Lombardi (born November 11, 1956) is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work in information architecture, user interface design and in the design of computer systems that support collaboration between large numbers of users. Lombardi currently serves as Duke University's Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support.
- Chip Salzenberg
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, …
- James Seng
Seng Ching Hong (commonly referred to as James Seng) is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is recognized as an international expert in the Internet arena. He gave regular speeches at various forums on several Internet issues such as IDN, VoIP, IPv6, spam, OSS and Internet governance issues.
- 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".
- 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, …
- Carsten Haitzler
Carsten Haitzler (born 1975), known as Raster or Rasterman to the open source community, is an Australian/German (his father is German and his mother is Finnish) software engineer best known for initiating the development of the Enlightenment X-Window Manager for UNIX/Linux. He now acts as the project's lead developer. He currently resides in Tokyo, Japan with his girlfriend Meg.
- Rob Savoye
Rob Savoye is the primary developer of Gnash. He is a developer for the GNU project, having worked on Debian, Red Hat and dozens of other free/open source software projects. He was among the first employees of Cygnus Support, which was sold to Red Hat in 2001. He began programming computers in 1977 using Fortran 4. Some of the projects he has worked on include GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Cygwin, eCos and CTAS. Rob manages an unofficial website for the Rainbow Family of Living Light.
- Michael Tabolsky
Vincent: What happens after that?Lance: I'm kinda curious about that myself.
- Jeffrey Carl
Jeffrey Carl is best known as an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Open Source Software (OSS) journalist and commentator, and was one of the first general technology publication writers to provide extensive coverage of OSS. He was most active from 1997-2001 as a columnist for the industry publication "Boardwatch Magazine" and contributor to other ISP publications including "Daemon News", "Web Hosting Magazine", "CLEC Magazine" and others.
- Orr Dunkelman
Dr. Orr Dunkelman (Ph.D) is an Israeli computer scientist and activist in the Israeli open source software community. He has written several articles in technical publications, mostly about cryptography and cryptology. Dunkelman obtained a Ph.D in computer science from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He is currently a post-doc researcher. He is also known as one of the co-founders of the Haifa Linux Club and as its benevolent dictator by common vote.
- Karl Asha
Karl Asha (Born Kareem Ismat Rafik Asha, 16 June 1974, in Beirut, Lebanon) is the initiator of the Blackdown Java project. In 1996, observing the lack of a Linux solution for the Java programming language, entered into a restrictive agreement with Sun Microsystems to build a binary distribution of the Sun JDK for Linux. This agreement placed restrictions prohibiting the redistribution of the Java Development Kit source code, as it was not Open Source Software.
- John Hinsdale
John Kelley Hinsdale, (born October 9, 1963) is an open source programmer and database software specialist. He is known for his contributions to the open source software community, particularly with the Oracle database and the Lisp programming language. Since the year 2000 Hinsdale has been involved in the field of bioinformatics and in the application of large scale database technology to the field of genomics
- Jonathan Shieber
Jonathan Shieber is a business journalist for Dow Jones. He covers green technology for the company's newsletters division, which is part of the enterprise media group. Before switching to green technology, he covered information technology, open source software and other specific areas of technology. On those beats, he broke several important stories on software, cleantech, and corporate investing. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, …
- James Clark
James Clark, (February 23 1964) is the author of groff and expat and has done much work with open-source software and XML. Born in London, and educated at Charterhouse and Merton College, Oxford, Clark has lived in Bangkok, Thailand since 1995, and is now a permanent resident. He owns a small company called Thai Open Source Software Center, which provides him a legal framework for his open-source activities.
- Dan Aloni
Dan Aloni (born November 1, 1982) is a software engineer best known for the creation and initial development of the Cooperative Linux OSS project. He now works in XIV. As a self-taught software engineer interested in the software virtualiztion field, back in 2001 he had attempted to port User Mode Linux to Windows using the Cygwin project. Although this attempt has spawned the UML-Win32 project, it didn't manage to take off, …
- James Kring
James (Jim) Kring is the president of James Kring, Inc., a California-based systems integration company. An internationally-recognised LabVIEW software engineer, Kring brought the concept of open source to the LabVIEW programming langage. He has also helped establish OpenG, a community dedicated to open source LabVIEW software and tools. James Kring, Inc.
- Benjamin C. Pierce
Benjamin C. Pierce is a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Pierce joined Penn in 1998 from Indiana University and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research includes work on programming languages, static type systems, distributed programming, mobile agents, and process calculi.
- Wayne Davison
Wayne Davison programmer, musician, born December 14 in California. Wayne's first well-known project was trn, a Usenet newsreader based on Larry Wall's rn. During this time Wayne created the unified context diff (modifying GNU diff and patch), which allowed patches for open-source software packages to be smaller and easier to read. Other open-source software projects he has either maintained or helped to maintain include screen, patch, rsync "(current maintainer)", …
- Andrew S. Rappaport
Andrew S. Rappaport or Andy Rappaport (born 1957) is an American Silicon Valley venture capitalist partner in August Capital an information technology venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. In the last three years he has become recognized as one of the largest American Democratic Party donors and philanthropist with his wife Deborah Rappaport. Andy Rappaport joined August Capital in 1996.
- Danese Cooper
Danese Cooper is an advocate of open-source software. She is on the board of the Open Source Initiative. She came to public attention for her work at Sun Microsystems on promoting open source, and presently works at Intel. Her father named her after his Alfa Romeo. In her twenties, Cooper was in the Peace Corps and involved in management of the Renaissance Faire in California. She worked on the Options Trading Floor at the Pacific Exchange, …
- Richard French
Richard French combines technical expertise with business savvy, to help internet and software companies achieve their full potential. Since 1998, he has built successful internet companies and brands in remote access, on-line media, communities, entertainment and advertising.
- Eric di Benedetto
Professional investor in software start-ups since 1991.
- Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, and an activist for open standards. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference.
- Scott Elcomb
- Stephen Harpster
Stephen Lau wrote: > You seem to have misread the email. Stephen (Harpster)'s email is
- Les Thompson
I’m a software developer…technology manager and consultant with experience managing technical and non-technical teams.My experience includes team management, systems analysis, business process analysis, business unit management, software development, software pre-sales, quality assurance, database development, project and services sales, recruiting, competitive analysis, business intelligence, and applications architecture.
- Cliff Schmidt
Cliff Schmidt is the XML Standards Strategy Program Manager for Microsoft's Webdata team, which is responsible for MSXML and the . NET Framework's XML classes. Aside from working with several W3C working groups to address a broad cross-section of XML-related issues, Cliff also represents Microsoft on the W3C XML Schema Working Group and previously served on the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee.