- 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.
- 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.
- Ken Thompson
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems.
- Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department.
- W. Richard Stevens
William Richard (Rich) Stevens (February 5 1951 Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) - September 1 1999) was one of the most famous and widely acclaimed authors of UNIX and TCP/IP books.
- 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, …
- Tom Christiansen
Tom Christiansen (also nicknamed "tchrist" or occasionally "thoth") is a well-known Unix developer and user especially known for his many contributions to the Perl programming language. He was the author of much of the core Perl documentation, including the manual pages perlfaq and perltoot. In 1999, he was one of the original recipients of the White Camel Awards from Perl Mongers for his contribution to Perl's documentation.
- Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan, (born 1942 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie.
- 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.
- Rob Pike
Robert C. Pike (born 1956) is a software engineer and author. He is best known for his work at Bell Labs, where he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language. He also worked on the Blit graphical terminal for Unix; before that he wrote the first window system for Unix in 1981.
- Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote 'regex', a widely-used Library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News. He also co-authored "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers". Whilst working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the US, starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s.
- Eric Allman
As Sendmail's Chief Science Officer and co-founder, Eric Allman leads the company's technology strategy and direction. Allman authored sendmail, the world's first Internet Mail program, in 1981 while at the University of California at Berkeley. He continues to spearhead sendmail.org, the global team of volunteers that maintain and support the sendmail Open Source platform.
- Robert Morris
Robert "Bob" Morris is an American cryptographer. He was an employee of Bell Labs and later served as chief scientist of the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center.. He is the father of Robert Tappan Morris, who wrote the (in)famous 1988 Morris Worm. Morris contributed to early versions of UNIX. He wrote the math library, the crypt program, and the password encryption algorithm.
- 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.
- Paul Vixie
Paul Vixie is the author of several RFCs and well known UNIX system programs, among them SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. While he was employed by DEC, in 1988 he started working on the popular internet domain name server BIND, of which he was the primary author and architect, until release 8. After he left DEC, in 1994 he founded Internet Software Consortium (ISC) together with Rick Adams and Carl Malamud to support BIND and other software for the Internet.
- Dan Farmer
Dan Farmer (born April 5, 1962) is a computer security researcher. In a summer course in 1989, in order to graduate from Purdue University he started the development of the COPS program for identifying security issues on Unix systems under Gene Spafford, first releasing it after leaving Purdue in late 1989. In 1995, he and Wietse Venema created Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (SATAN), one of the earliest network based vulnerability scanners.
- 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.
- Casper Dik
Casper Dik is a "Senior Staff Engineer " at Sun Microsystems and a OpenSolaris Governing Board member. He previously served on the OGB's predecessor, the Community Advisory Board. He is a regular contributor to the Solaris usenet community and the maintainer of the Solaris 2 FAQ.
- Ion
In Unix computing, Ion (aka IonWM) is a tiling and tabbing window manager for the X Window System. It is designed such that it is possible to manage windows using only a keyboard, without needing a mouse. It is the successor of PWM and is written by the same author. Since the first release of Ion in the summer 2000, similar alternative window management ideas have begun to show in other new window managers: Larswm, ratpoison, StumpWM, WMI, and TrsWM.
- David Korn
David Korn is an American computer programmer, who is probably best known for creating the Korn shell ("ksh"), a command line shell interface/programming language. The Korn shell is a de facto standard for UNIX-like systems and many other environments. David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969.
- Matthias Ettrich
Matthias Ettrich (born June 14, 1972 in Bietigheim, southern Germany) is the computer scientist who founded the KDE project in 1996, when he proposed on Usenet a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment" ["sic"] for UNIX using the Qt GUI toolkit. Ettrich also founded and furthered the LyX project in 1995, initially conceived as a university term project. LyX is a graphical frontend to LaTeX.
- Andy Bechtolsheim
Andy Bechtolsheim , co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and employee number one, is a product architect with the Systems Group. Andy works with the Systems Group to help drive next generation X64 and storage servers product architecture as well as HPC opportunities. Bechtolsheim has more than 25 years of Network Computing knowledge and expertise.
- P. J. Plauger
P. J. Plauger is an author and entrepreneur. He has written and co-written articles and books about programming style, software tools, and the C programming language. He founded Whitesmiths, the first company to sell a C compiler and Unix-like operating system (Idris). He has since been involved in C and C++ standardization and is now the president of Dinkumware. Plauger wrote a science-fiction short story, "Child of All Ages", …
- Douglas McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2006 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Dr. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed the Unix pipeline implementation, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. Dr. McIlroy earned his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954, …
- Peter H. Salus
Peter H. Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages. He has a 1963 PhD. in Linguistics from New York University. After an intense academic career serving as professor and dean at several universities, he is now largely retired.
- 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.
- John Lions
John Lions (January 17 1937 in Sydney, Australia - December 5, 1998 in Sydney) was an Australian computer scientist. He is best known as the author of "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code", commonly known as the "Lions Book".
- John Gage
John Burdette Gage (born 1942), is one of the original employees of Sun Microsystems; in 1982 he joined Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andy Bechtolsheim, and fifteen others to found Sun. Today he serves as Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office for Sun.
- Tom Duff
Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff (b. December 8, 1952, named for his putative ancestor, the fifth Earl of Selkirk) is a computer programmer. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.Math and, two years later, got a M.Sc. from the University of Toronto.
- 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.
- Mike Muuss
Michael John Muuss (October 16, 1958 - November 20, 2000) was the author of the freeware network tool Ping. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Lab in Maryland when he died, specialising in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks.
- Don Hopkins
Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in computer-human interaction and computer graphics. He invented pie menus, inspired Richard Stallman to use the term copyleft, coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker, built imaginative applications for the NeWS window system, ported the "SimCity" computer game to several versions of Unix and developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11, …
- Jon Hall
Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organization of computer vendors who wish to support and promote Linux based operating systems. The nickname "maddog" was given to him by his students at Hartford State Technical College, where he was the Department Head of Computer Science. He now prefers to be called by this name.
- Stephen C. Johnson
Stephen Curtis Johnson spent nearly 20 years at Bell Labs and AT&T, where he wrote Yacc, Lint, and the Portable C Compiler. Steve earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics, but has spent his entire career in computing. He has worked on topics as diverse as computer music, psychometrics, and VLSI design, but he is best known for his work on Unix tools, and the first AT&T UNIX port. He also ran the UNIX System V language development department for several years in the mid-1980s.
- Marc J. Rochkind
Marc J. Rochkind is a computer programmer, most famous for his textbook "Advanced Unix Programming", regarded as a standard text on how to program to the Unix operating system.
- Pax
pax is a utility defined and created by the IEEE Std 1003.2 ("POSIX.2") standard. By default, it creates archives in ustar format, also defined by the POSIX standard. Rather than sort out the incompatible options that have crept up between <tt>tar</tt> and <tt>cpio</tt>, along with their implementations across various versions of UNIX, the IEEE designed a new archive utility.
- Karl Lehenbauer
Karl Lehenbauer (born April 5, 1958) was the founder of NeoSoft in the early 1990s, which was the first Internet Service Provider in the southern United States as well as the first to offer cable modem service in Houston, Texas, among other technological milestones. NeoSoft was later sold to Internet America in 1998. Lehenbauer also wrote the Internet (socket) capabilities of the Tcl programming language.
- Rich Skrenta
Richard "Rich" Skrenta (b.1967 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a computer programmer. In 1982, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is considered the first computer virus to be found "in the wild." Skrenta graduated from Northwestern University. Between 1989 and 1991 he worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix.
- Geoff Collyer
Geoff Collyer is a Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of "C News", a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview database (article index) used by all modern newsreaders. In the past he worked as a Unix system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on and developing "Plan 9". He is now back at Bell Labs Research. The asteroid 129101 Geoffcollyer is named in his honour.