- 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.
- Doc Searls
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal , which has been covering the world's fastest-growing operating system since Version 1.0, in 1994. He is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto , perhaps the only book (and probably the only bestseller) that began as a rant on a Web site. He also writes Doc Searls Weblog , which usually ranks well up in Technorati's Top 100 blogs (out of about 2.7 million).
- Mark Shuttleworth
Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African entrepreneur who was the second self-funded space tourist and first African national in space. He is now best known for his leadership of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. He currently lives in London and holds dual citizenship of South Africa and the United Kingdom
- J. D. Frazer
J. D. Frazer (born 1965), pen name Illiad, is the artist and writer of the webcomic "User Friendly". The strip debuted in November, 1997, and is considered to be one of the first major webcomics. It is about a group of characters who work for a fictional Internet Service Provider, and the comic's readership consists mainly of programmers, self-styled geeks, and other technophiles.
- 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.
- Mitchell Baker
Winifred Mitchell Baker, better known simply as Mitchell Baker, is Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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), …
- 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.
- Guido van Rossum
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch computer programmer who is best known as the author of the Python programming language. In the Python community, Van Rossum is known as a "Benevolent Dictator for Life", meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary.
- Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf founded CollabNet, with O'Reilly & Associates , in July 1999. The company provides tools and services based on open source methods. Before launching CollabNet, Behlendorf was co-founder and CTO of Organic Online , a Web design and engineering consultancy located in San Francisco. During his five years at Organic, Behlendorf helped create Internet strategies for dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
- Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon (born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1940) is an American media personality and author whose work in radio includes formerly hosting "The Connection" for WBUR. He created the show with his long-time producer Mary McGrath. <sup></sup> He is a former journalist with the New York Times, former WGBH Boston evening news anchor for the 10 o'clock news from 1977 until its cancellation in May of 1991, and a candidate for mayor of Boston in 1993.
- 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.
- 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.
- Asa Dotzler
Asa Dotzler, born in Tennessee on June 5, 1974, is best known for his work as community coordinator for several Mozilla projects. He was an early member of Mozilla’s Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing Program, which grew under his leadership from just a few contributors when Dotzler joined the project to tens of thousands of volunteers today. Dotzler is co-founder and community coordinator for the Spread Firefox project, launched in October 2004, …
- 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.
- Martin Varsavsky
Martin Varsavsky is an Argentinian/Spanish telecommunications and new media entrepreneur. Born in Buenos Aires on April 26, 1960, to Carlos Varsavsky and Silvia Waisman, Varsavsky attended primary school at the New Model School and the Colegio Nicolás Avellaneda high school. At the age of 16, he moved with his family to the United States as a refugee, following the forced disappearance of his cousin, David Horacio Varsavsky.
- 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.
- 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.
- Jonas Jacobi
Jonas Jacobi is a J2EE and open source evangelist at Oracle. A native of Sweden, Jonas has worked in the software industry for more than fifteen years. Prior to joining Oracle, Jonas worked at several major Swedish software companies in management, consulting, development, and project management roles. For the past three years, Jonas has been responsible for the product management of JavaServer Faces, Oracle ADF Faces, …
- 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.
- Nat Friedman
Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born August 6 1977), known as "Nat", is a programmer who co-founded Ximian along with Miguel de Icaza in 1999, a company that was later bought by Novell in 2003. Nat held the post of CEO of Ximian from 1999 to 2001 when Ximian brought in David Patrick as an external CEO after the company raised fifteen million dollars of venture capital. Before Ximian, Friedman worked on the GNU ROPE project, and interned at Silicon Graphics and Microsoft.
- Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz (born 1969) is an American journalist who covers the cultural impact of science and technology, such as topics on open source software and hacker subcultures. She has written for many periodicals from "Popular Science" to "Wired", and since 1999 has had a syndicated weekly column called "Techsploitation". From 2004-2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
- 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.
- Andy Hertzfeld
Andy Hertzfeld (born April 6, 1953) was a key member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a key designer of the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990 and Eazel in 1999. Hertzfeld joined Google in 2005 and has been working there since.
- 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.
- Ian Foster
Ian Foster is the Senior Scientist (Associate Division Director) in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he leads the Distributed Systems Laboratory, and he is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is also involved with both the Open Grid Forum and with the Globus Alliance as an open source strategist. In 2006, he was appointed director of the Computation Institute, …
- Peter Gutmann
Peter Gutmann is a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand; he also received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Auckland. Interested in computer security issues, including security architecture, security usability (or more precisely the lack thereof), and hardware security, he has discovered assorted flaws in publicly released cryptosystems and protocols.
- 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.
- Christopher Blizzard
Christopher Blizzard is a Systems Engineer and open source software developer who works at Red Hat. He has a done lot of work on Mozilla and sits on the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. Blizzard is a high-school drop-out who earned a G.E.D. in 1994
- Steven Weber
Steven Weber is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and the Director of the Institute of International Studies. He is also the editor of Globalization and the European Political Economy (Columbia University Press, 2000). He is the author of several books about international politics and economics. His most well-known book is about the economy and motivations behind open source and free software, …
- Bram Moolenaar
Bram Moolenaar is an active member of the open source software community. He is the author of Vim, a text editor which is very popular among programmers and users of Free Software. He is also: * Ex-board member of the NLUUG, the Dutch Unix user group. * Project leader of A-A-P, a build tool similar to make. * Founder and treasurer of the ICCF Holland foundation, a small charitable organization that supports a project aimed at helping AIDS victims in Uganda.
- 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.
- Dan Fernandez
Dan Fernandez is the Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio Express at Microsoft corporation. He has worked for Microsoft since 2001 most recently he was the C# Product Manager until an unfortunate incident with a hedge trimmer. Dan is a frequent speaker at events like Developer Days, TechEd, and Visual Studio Connections. His contributions include the Visual Studio Express products and creating the Coding4Fun Web site, …
- Michael Tiemann
Michael Tiemann is a true open source software pioneer. His first major open source contributions included ports of and enhancements to GCC and GDB as well as the original authorship of the GNU C++ compiler, the world's first native-code C++ compiler. In 1989, Michael's technical successes and entreprenurial spirit led him to co-found Cygnus Solutions, the first company to provide commercial support for open source software.
- John Buckman
John Buckman is founder of Magnatune, a Berkeley, California-based record label he founded in 2003 and which is known for its commercial application of Creative Commons licensing and overtly artist-friendly business practices. Buckman's methods include forming non-exclusive agreements with musicians, sharing profits equally with them, and allowing them to retain full rights to their own music.
- 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.