- 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.
- Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara is an American technology journalist. Through her company G2 Computer Intelligence, Inc., O'Gara publishes three paid subscription e-mail newsletters: "Client Server News", "LinuxGram" (formerly "Maureen O'Gara's LinuxGram") and "ePostal News". Until May 2005, "Maureen O'Gara's LinuxGram" was distributed by "Linux Business News", a now-defunct imprint of Sys-Con Media.
- Alan Cox
Alan Cox (born 1968) is a British computer programmer heavily involved in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days (1991).
- 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., …
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Ian Murdock
Ian Murdock is the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and the commercial Linux distributor Progeny. He currently works for Sun Microsystems "head[ing] up operating system platform strategy" ; previously he served as the Chief Technology Officer of the Linux Foundation and is chair of the Linux Standard Base, the Linux platform interoperability standard. He lives in Indiana, USA. He wrote the Debian Manifesto in 1993 while a student at Purdue University, …
- Greg Kroah-Hartman
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, …
- 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.
- Daniel Robbins
Daniel Robbins is a software developer best known as the founder and former chief architect of the Gentoo Linux project.
- Patrick Volkerding
Patrick Volkerding (born 1966) is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. He is the Slackware Benevolent Dictator for Life. Volkerding earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993. For a short while, Chris Lumens and others have assisted with his work on Slackware. Due to the lack of a continuing revenue stream following the sale of his publisher, Walnut Creek CDROM, …
- David Kirsch
David "Zoid" Kirsch is a computer game developer. His first notable project was Threewave CTF (Capture the flag) modification for "Quake", in 1996. He was hired by id Software in 1997 to develop the CTF modes, which he over time implemented for "Quake II" (see Q2CTF) and "Quake III Arena". He was also one of the leading programmers of "QuakeWorld". At id, he was also one of the people responsible for maintaining the Linux ports of id games.
- 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.
- Pamela Jones
Pamela Jones, commonly known as PJ, is the creator and editor of Groklaw, an award-winning website that covers legal news of interest to the free and open-source software community. Jones is a journalist, who previously trained and worked as a paralegal. PJ's articles have appeared in Linux Journal, LWN, LinuxWorld Magazine, Linux Today, and LinuxWorld.com. She also writes a monthly column for the UK print publication Linux User and Developer.
- Darl McBride
Darl McBride (b. circa 1960) became the CEO of The SCO Group (formerly known as Caldera) on June 28, 2002. During his tenure, Caldera renamed itself The SCO Group, and on March 7, 2003 initiated litigation against IBM regarding the intellectual property status of the Linux operating system.
- Ryan Gordon
Ryan Gordon (also known as Icculus) is a former Loki Software employee, now responsible for Icculus.org, which hosts many Loki Software projects, as well as hosts new projects started by himself which include, a port of Duke Nukem 3D, a port of Shadow Warrior, an enhanced port of Quake III Arena (ioquake3), and many other projects for Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows.
- Adrian Bunk
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.
- Neal Stephenson
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.
- Bill Hilf
Bill Hilf is the general manager of Platform Strategy driving Microsoft's platform strategy efforts across the company. Bill's primary focus is to champion platform initiatives that cross these groups, while leading long-term strategy planning in the Windows Server and Tools organization.
- Bdale Garbee
Bdale Garbee is a computer specialist who works with Linux, particularly Debian GNU/Linux. He is currently the Linux CTO at Hewlett-Packard, and the current President of Software in the Public Interest. Bdale Garbee has been a Debian developer since the earliest days of the project in the mid-1990s, and he set up the original developer machine named "master.debian.org" in 1995. He has later served as a Debian Project Leader for one year (2002-2003).
- Matthew Szulik
Matthew J. Szulik - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Red Hat, leader of some other technology companies, such as Interleaf and MapInfo for more than 20 years. Szulik is passionate about improving the educational opportunities for students worldwide through open source, and he is a spokesperson to industry, government, and education leaders on open source computing.
- 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".
- Mark Spencer
Mark Spencer (born April 8, 1977) is a computer engineer and is the original author of the GTK+-based instant messaging client Gaim, the L2TP daemon l2tpd and the Cheops Network User Interface. Mark Spencer is also the creator of Asterisk, a Linux-based open-sourced PBX in software. He is the founder, chairman and CTO of Digium, an open-source telecommunications supplier most notable for its development and sponsorship of Asterisk.
- Bob Young
Robert "Bob" Young was born in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada and graduated from the University of Toronto. He created the ACC Corporation which merged with Red Hat in 1995. From the merger to 1999 Bob Young was Red Hat's CEO. After leaving Red Hat he started Lulu.com, a self-publishing web-site that claims to be the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books. He is Lulu.com's CEO. Young also co-founded "Linux Journal" in 1994, and in 2003, …
- Donald Becker
Donald Becker is a notable developer well known for writing many of the Ethernet drivers for the Linux operating system. Thousands of computers around the world routinely use his drivers to connect to the Internet. Becker also created Beowulf clustering while at NASA, using software to connect many inexpensive PCs to solve complex math problems typically reserved for classic supercomputers.
- 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.
- Larry Ewing
Larry Ewing is a US computer programmer who is known as the creator of the Linux mascot, Tux. He also created the Ximian monkey logo and is involved in: *F-Spot: a project aiming to "manage all your digital photography needs." *GtkHTML: a fast and dirty HTML renderer and editor used in several free software projects. *Novell Evolution: a mailer, a calendar and a contact manager, all in one. *GIMP: an image manipulation program. *Gill: an experimental SVG renderer.
- Con Kolivas
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.
- 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.
- Russ Nelson
Russ Nelson (born 1958) is an American computer programmer, who is a founding board member of the Open Source Initiative. He is best known for his packet driver collection, begun while at Clarkson University in 1988. He started Crynwr Software to support his open source software Freemacs (currently used by FreeDOS), Painter's Apprentice (a MacPaint clone), and went full-time with the packet driver collection in 1991.
- Pieter van den Abeele
Pieter Van den Abeele is the founder of Gentoo/PowerPC, a foundation connected with a distribution of the Linux computer operating system. He joined Gentoo shortly after its conception, merging Gentoo's first port into the mainline Gentoo repository, paving the way for other Gentoo Linux ports by implementing amongst many other things the Gentoo architecture keywords and portage profiles.
- Jim Gettys
Jim Gettys is a computer programmer. Currently, he is at the One Laptop Per Child project working to create the $100 laptop. He is Vice President of Software, responsible for the laptops' system software. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on it again with X.Org, where he served on the board of directors. He previously served on the GNOME foundation board of directors.
- Dave Sifry
David Sifry is a serial entrepreneur with over 19 years of software development and industry experience. Before founding Technorati, Sifry was cofounder and CTO of Sputnick , a Wi-Fi gateway company, and previously, cofounder of Linuxcare, where he served as CTO and VP of Engineering. Sifry also served as a founding member of the board of Linux International and on the technical advisory board of the National Cybercrime Training Partnership for law enforcement nctp.org .
- Jim Kent
Jim Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been a major contributor to genome database projects. While a graduate student in biology there, he wrote the program that allowed the publicly funded Human Genome Project to assemble and publish the human genome database before the commercial effort by the company Celera Genomics.
- Doug Cutting
Doug Cutting is an advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He originated the Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, the Nutch open-source search technology projects, which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. Prior to developing Lucene, Doug held search technology positions at Excite and Xerox PARC. Lucene, a search indexer, and Nutch, a spider or crawler, are the two key components of an open-source general search platform, …
- Peter MacDonald
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.
- Marc Ewing
Marc Ewing is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in in the 86open project in the mid-90s.
- Markus Kuhn
Dr. Markus G. Kuhn (born 1971 in Munich) is a German computer scientist, currently teaching and researching at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He graduated from the University of Erlangen (Germany), Purdue University (Indiana, US), and the University of Cambridge (England), and is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. Kuhn's main research interests include computer security, in particular the hardware and signal-processing aspects of it, …
- Moshe Bar
Moshe Bar is the founder, main developer and project manager of openMosix. Moshe is founder of the company behind the Xen software, XenSource, Inc. Moshe also co-founded Qlusters Inc, an open source systems management software company with headquarters in Palo Alta, California and offices in New York City and Tel Aviv, Israel (also see openQRM).