Alan is a major contributor to Slackware Linux. He authored (or edited if you ask him) the Slackbook. Alan is also an administrator of the enormously popular slackbuilds.org.
Amber Graner is an active Ubuntu community member and organizer who encourages everyone around her to participate, support, and learn about Ubuntu and Open Source. With a smile and a sense of humor, Amber reminds people that there is a place for everyone in the Ubuntu community – regardless of technical skill level (or lack thereof). She is constantly looking for people, places, and events within the Ubuntu community that help inspire Ubuntu users to participate actively within the Ubuntu community. A few of the hats Amber wears are blogger and contributor to Ubuntu User Magazine, Ubuntu Women Project Team Leader, Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, North Carolina LoCo Team Lead as well as wife and mom.
Andrew Dunstan has been a contributor to PostgreSQL since 2003 and a committer since 2005. He created the PotsgreSQL Buildfarm, and has contributed many features to PostgreSQL, including CSV import and export, and dollar quoting. He also contributed the abstract schema mechanism that is used in Bugzilla to support multiple database backends. In 2007 he founded Dunslane Consulting LLC, which specializes in PostgreSQL work, and in 2009 he founded PostgreSQL Experts Inc, of which he is a director, along with a number of other PostgreSQL luminaries. Andrew has worked in IT, mainly on Linux and Unix platforms, for 25 years.
I am Director of Consulting at Percona and the lead author of High Performance MySQL. My online nickname “Xaprb” is my first name typed in QWERTY on a Dvorak keyboard layout. It is not meant to be pronounceable, so please invent your own pronunciation. In addition to my book, I’ve created a few open-source projects: Maatkit, Better Cacti Templates, and innotop. You can contact me like this: SELECT REVERSE( 'moc.anocrep@norab');
Kuhn began his work in the Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the popular GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various FLOSS projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software development consultant for various companies, large and small. He also taught Advanced Placement Computer Science (using FLOSS) at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. In January 2000, he was hired by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). From 2001 until 2005, he was FSF's Executive Director, where he led FSF's GPL enforcement efforts, launched the Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. In 2005, he left FSF to join the founding team of the Software Freedom Law Center, where he still works as a Policy Analyst and Technology Director. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola College in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. His Master's thesis discussed methods for interoperability of dynamic languages, which helped justify the need for the Parrot VM project. Kuhn is also a director and president of the Software Freedom Conservancy, and a member of the autonomo.us committee, which studies issues of software freedom as they relate to network services.
Brandon has worked for several web hosting companies and has worked do develop, improve, and maintain hundreds of LAMP-based websites and applications.
Brian Smith is CTO of DNS.com and a long time FOSS supporter and group organizer in the Louisville, Kentucky area.
Bryan A Smith is a Debian Gnu/Linux and BSD enthusiast, hardware hacker and Systems Engineer. Bryan has used Open Source Operating Systems since the days of Red Hat 5 Hurricane. He contributes to several Open Source projects and has helped launch several startup ISP’s based in his area using Open Source software as a framework. Bryan is currently the Chief Technical Officer at Tacit Labs Inc and Lead Systems Administrator at Dreamfish.com Global Collaborative. Bryan spends his free time administering his free Linux shell server SHellium.org, advocating Open Source, proctoring BSD Associate Certification, writing poetry and playing Bossa Nova and Flamenco guitar.
Born and raised in Raleigh, NC and now resident in Hilton Head, SC. Interested in art, tennis, golf, table tennis and technology. Enjoys culture, history and debate. Grew up wanting to work at IBM and got that chance in 2000. Constantly learning new technologies to stay sharp in the IT industry. Project Founder and Project Architect of LinuxDNA, a high performance Linux kernel source that can be compiled with the Intel ICC compiler.
Cat Allman is a Program Manager for Google's Open Source Programs Office, working on events and programs that support the Open Source community at large. Cat has been involved with the free and Open Source community since the mid 1980s, including stints at Mt Xinu, Sendmail, Inc, and the USENIX Association. She has also done time as a Systems Administrator, IT Manager, and in marketing and sales. Cat loves bringing together smart people to talk tech and get things done
as cheaply as makes sense.
Celeste Lyn Paul is a designer, researcher, and computer geek, although not always in that order. She is an open source design advocate who aims at improving the quality of FLOSS software by education developers about design and working with them on design challenges in their projects. She is involved in the greater FLOSS Human-Computer Interaction community, helps lead the KDE Usability Project, and serves on the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. More information about her may be found at www.celestelynpaul.com.
Richard Hipp first discovered Yggdrasil Linux in 1993 and some form or the other of Linux has been his primary desktop ever since. Richard has done freelance software development since 1992. He designed and wrote the SQLite database engine in 2000. Richard and his wife Ginger live and work in Charlotte, NC.
Dan Chen is an Ubuntu core developer who has lost many a grey hair on nontrivial portions of his spare time struggling with audio hardware enablement and integration issues across Ubuntu derivatives.
Daniel Walsh has worked in the computer security field for over 25 years. Dan joined Red Hat in August 2001. He has led the SELinux project, concentrating on the application space and policy development. Previously, Dan worked on Netect/Bindview on HackerShield and BVControl for Unix, Vulnerability Assessment Products. Prior to this Dan worked for Digital Equipment Corporation on the Athena Project along with designing and developing the AltaVista Firewall and AltaVista Tunnel (VPN) Products. Dan has a BA in Mathematics from the College of the Holy Cross and a MS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Dann has been working with Linux both as a hobby and professionally for over 10 years now. He was the co-founder of the Lehigh Valley Linux Users Group and is a host of the Linux Link Tech Show. He was formerly a Network Administrator the utilized Linux and FOSS technology on a daily basis in a K-12 environment and currently programs PHP in a LAMP environment using exclusively FOSS tools.
Mobile Team Manager for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, Canonical employee, has been involved in Linux since 1994 and spends his day helping craft the Ubuntu Linux distribution releases for ARM. He has been working in the embedded space for more then 30 years starting as a hardware engineer and software developer.
Doug Vann is is a Drupal Developer & Trainer for Chicago-based Duo Consulting.
Doug entered Geekdom as a fifth grader in 1983 with a Commodore 64 and a 300baud connection to CompuServe. Twenty-seven years later he leads the Indiana Drupal Users Group and develops in Drupal full-time.
Catch Doug's blog at www.DougVann.com. Google "Drupal Song," and you're likely to find a few videos of Doug, jamming on the guitar, unabashedly proclaiming his passion for Drupal!
His love for learning and experimenting in Drupal is overshadowed only by his love to teach and evangelize it. He has presented in Minneapolis, Toronto, Indianapolis, Ohio LinuxFest, DoItWithDrupal, and DrupalCamps in Madison, Atlanta, Chicago, Orlando, Nashville, and L.A. You can often find Doug on the FREENODE IRC Network in Drupal-support helping people get through the steep learning curve of Drupal. Doug, his wife of 14 years, and their 4 children reside in Indianapolis.
Andrew 'Drew' Jensen - Six year OpenOffice.org (OO.o) community member, co-Founder OO.o User Services forums and current co-Lead of the Database (Base) QA team. Owner of BaseAnswers.com, offering FOSS based document automation services. 25+ years experience in commercial software development.
Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor and curriculum developer, and author. She is author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and the upcoming Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Source Business Resource, a free monthly publication covering open source and the commercialization of open source assets. She is founder and current Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to create the standard for certifying BSD system administrators. She recently joined the Board of the FreeBSD Foundation.
Ian Weller has been a contributor to the Fedora Project since early 2008 as a packager, general wiki manager and all-around hacker, as well as an intern for Red Hat's Community Architecture team. He graduated high school in May and will be attending the University of Kansas in the fall.
James Schweitzer is an IT Specialist at IBM who has the privilege of deploying Linux and other Open Source solutions. He has performed large scale deployments in retail, education, medical, financial and entertainment fields.
Jay Pfaffman is an assistant professor of instructional technology at the University of Tennessee. He instructs teachers on how and why to consider using Open Source Software in their own classrooms and models using OSS by using only OSS tools and loaning students laptops so that they can install and use Ubuntu. He studies how to increase the availability of computers in K-12 classrooms using thin clients and Linux Terminal Servers. He has also developed a range of web-based applications for education, including Webliographer, an early social bookmarking application designed especially for schools.
John Curran is the President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), responsible for leading the organization in its mission of managing the distribution of Internet number resources in its geographic region. He was also a founder of ARIN and served as its Chairman frominception through early 2009. He has also been an active participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), having both co-chaired the IETF Operations and Network Management Area and served as a member of the IPng (IPv6) Directorate.
Jon Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org), an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager and educator. He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI. He currently works as an independent consultant, and is currently involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces. Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software. He has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies". Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brasil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software. Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations. Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software, and received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.
Jono Bacon works at Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager, and helps lead the worldwide community of contributors who work on the Ubuntu family of distributions. He started his work back in 1998, building one of the UK’s first Linux websites, Linux UK, and created a large team of contributors who produced and maintained the site. While at University, Bacon went on to join the KDE project, founded the KDE Usability Study, KDE::Enterprise, wrote some KDE applications and became the UK contact for the project. After he graduated from the University Of Wolverhampton with a Ba(Hon) in Interactive Multimedia Communication, he went on to be a full-time journalist, writing over 400 articles for over 12 magazines and online publishing houses. He also wrote three books – Linux Desktop Hacks (O’Reilly), The Official Ubuntu Book (Prentice Hall) and Practical PHP and MySQL (Prentice Hall).
Joshua D. Drake, commonly referred to as JD in the community, is a Major PostgreSQL.Org Contributor, President of United States PostgreSQL and a Director for SPI, the non-profit behind Debian, OpenOffice and PostgreSQL.Org.
Keith Bergelt is the chief executive officer of Open Invention Network (OIN), the collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux. In this capacity he is directly responsible for enabling, influencing and defending the integrity of the Linux ecosystem. Central to the achievement of his goals is the acquisition and transfer of patent rights designed to permit members of the Linux ecosystem to operate free of the threat of assertion and litigation from those whose business models are antithetical to innovation and global economic growth in information technology and computing.
Prior to joining the Open Invention Network, Mr. Bergelt served as president and CEO of two Hedge Funds – Paradox Capital and IPI – formed to unlock the considerable asset value of patents, trademarks and copyrights in middle market companies. Paradox and IPI were the first Funds of their kind to offer specialty lending products supported exclusively by intellectual property. Driven by Mr. Bergelt’s creativity and entrepreneurial approach, these funds enabled the emergence of patents, trademarks and copyrights as a viable source of collateral in asset-based loans, forever reshaping the emerging IP Finance landscape.
During Mr. Bergelt’s stewardship of these IP-based lending activities, he raised more than $300 million dollars and financed portfolio companies of private equity firms including Texas Pacific Group, Kelso & Co., JH Whitney, Weston Presidio, Goode Partners, Palladium Capital and Castanea Partners, among others.
Previously, Mr. Bergelt served as a senior advisor to the technology investment division at Texas Pacific Group. He also headed business development, intellectual property and licensing for the Kelso & Company portfolio company Cambridge Display Technology in the United Kingdom. Additionally, he established and served as General Manager of the Strategic Intellectual Asset Management business unit at Motorola Corporation and served as Motorola’s director of Technology Strategy.
Mr. Bergelt was a co-founder of the Intellectual Property Advisory Practice within the Electronics and Telecommunications Industry group at SRI Consulting in Menlo Park, California.
Prior to his extensive private sector experience, Mr. Bergelt served for twelve years as a diplomat with postings at the United Nations in NY and the American Embassy in Tokyo, Japan where he was involved in the negotiation of IP rights protection in Asia.
Mr. Bergelt holds an Artium Baccalaureus degree from Duke University, a Jurist Doctorate degree from Southern Methodist University School of Law and a Masters of Business Administration degree from Theseus Institute in France. He is a frequent speaker on corporate strategy, finance and intellectual property management.
Host of the Bad Apples Podcast and correspondent for Hacker Public Radio, Klaatu is a multimedia artist and maintainer of slackermedia.info and the SlackBuilds for LiVES, freetalk, and HandBrake. He has written articles for Linux Journal and Linux Identity magazines. His Linux distributions of choice are Slackware and Fedora.
Mackenzie is working on her undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a focus on Computer Security and Information Assurance. She spends her downtime trying to make Ubuntu a better distribution. A history lover, she can expound upon the effects of the Norman Conquest or the lives of the women who pioneered the computing field. She is committed to getting others involved in contributing to Free & Open Source Software and will gladly show interested parties the ropes.
Matt Ray is the Product Manager for Zenoss Core and has been active in Open Source for over 10 years. He has managed the Zenoss Community for the last 2 years and worked both in an out of Open Source before that. He blogs at LeastResistance.net and is @mattray on Twitter.
Max Spevack has been with Red Hat for almost 6 years, and is currently the manager of Red Hat's Community Architecture team. He has been working with the Fedora Project since its 5th release, and served as the Fedora Project Leader for 2 years.
Michael currently works for Reductive Labs (now Puppet Labs), who develops puppet, a configuration management tool for systems administrators. Michael is the former lead developer for cobbler, an automated provisioning tool.
Montario Fletcher is currently a Mathematics teacher who helps make computing more accessible to high school students with Linux. He has a a B.A. in Computer Science from Mercer University and a Master of Information Systems degree from University of Phoenix. He is also pursuing a Ph.D in Educational Technology from Walden University. He hopes to provide freedom from school systems that cannot budget for proprietary software by showing them open source alternatives.
Nick Owen is the CEO and Co-founder of WiKID Systems, a dual-source two-factor authentication system. Nick has been involved with Internet start-ups since 1994 when he co-founded Interweb, Inc. He was COO of Derivion, an electronic bill presentment and payment service provider and co-founder and chairman of iTendant, developer of a web-to-wireless real estate workflow system for the commercial real estate market. WiKID provides a dual-source two-factor authentication system that utilizes public key encryption to securely deliver one-time passcodes. Nick has authored a number of tutorials on how to add two-factor authentication to a variety of open-source remote access solutions.
Patrick Davila initially developed a love of computers when he shared a Commodore Vic-20 with his brother back in the day. Since then he has worked primarily as a systems programmer/analyst and has 15 years of experience as an IT professional in the financial industry. In 1998 he was introduced to Linux and absolutely fell in love with the platform & the community around it. He is the co-host of The Linux Link Tech Show & MythTVCast podcasts.
Paul W. Frields has been a Linux user and enthusiast since 1997, and joined the Fedora Project in 2003, shortly after launch. As a founding member of the Fedora Board, Paul has worked on a variety of tasks, including guides and tutorials, website publishing, and toolchain development. He also maintains a number of packages in the Fedora repository. In 2008 Paul joined Red Hat as the Fedora Project Leader. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Virginia.
Pete Graner is the Kernel & Hardware Enablement manager at Canonical, where he leads the Ubuntu Kernel team and is responsible for the hardware enablement of the x86 & ARM kernels for Ubuntu. Prior to working at Canonical Pete worked at Red Hat as the Base Operating Systems manger. Pete has been developing on Linux since the mid 90's.
Phil Pfeiffer (B.S. [CS], Yale, 1976; M.S. [CS], Wisconsin, 1986; Ph.D. [CS], Wisconsin, 1991) currently serves as professor and associate graduate coordinator for East TN State University's Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences. Phil has also worked as a programmer-analyst for PPG Industries (1977-1984) and served as a consultant to the (former) Supercomputing Research Center (1992-1993) and, more recently, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (2003-2004), where he architected ORNL's Resource Allocation and Tracking System (RATS) for cross-CCS supercomputer usage tracking. This work for ORNL included the development-- and, more recently, the re-development and open-sourcing-- of Datamux, a "data pump" for transferring data from upstream to downstream datasets, and also validating and transforming that data while "in flight".
Rikki Kite is the Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User, and she's the former Managing Editor of Sys Admin Magazine and UnixReview.com. Rikki blogs about women in open source at: linuxpromagazine.com/roseblog.
Senior systems and network administrator with more than 20 total years of experience in BSD UNIX, Solaris, Linux and Cisco networking devices. Russ is co-founder and co-host of the "Linux in the Ham Shack" podcast as well as an avid audio engineering hobbyist, amateur radio enthusiast and independent music promoter. He is also a Linux Journal contributor and guest on various well-known Linux- and FOSS-related podcasts.
Russell has been involved in Asterisk development for over 5 years. He has contributed to many areas of the project, from core architectural design and development to project management. He graduated from Clemson University in the Fall of 2006 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and is currently pursuing a Masters' degree in Software Engineering and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
David joined the Asterisk development team at Digium in January of 2009 after graduating from Tennessee Tech University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. David has contributed to many important areas of the Asterisk code. Some of his most notable work includes the addition of a test framework and a major security update for the IAX2 protocol.
If you have played a major commercial 3D game in Linux, it was probably Ryan's port. Some of his work includes UT2004, Doom III, Google Earth, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Postal, Second Life, Serious Sam, and scores of other titles. He runs icculus.org, a "SourceForge with a soul" for open source projects.
Worked for companies ranging in sizes from dot-coms to fortune 500s. Worked in the vertical markets of telecom, financial, healthcare, tech companies, and government agencies. Scott has been a storage expert for the last nine years. Has been a Linux system administrator since early 1992. Active programmer using open source languages like Perl, PHP and Ruby. Active speaker in the local open source user groups including the Atlanta Perl Mongers. When not being a geek, loves to play paintball, go camping & hiking.
Stephen Spector is the Community Manager for the open source Xen.org community. He has spent more than 16 years in software engineering, product marketing, and developer/alliance program management at Citrix, Turbolinux, Racal Datacom, and Siemens. You can find Stephen daily attempting to keep the Xen.org developers and users under control.
Steven Dake has been involved in Open Source Linux for over 12 years professionally. Steven Dake was involved in the creation of the industry first Carrier Grade Linux software solution at MontaVista Software. While working at MontaVista Software, Mr. Dake initiated the openais project which has been used in thousands of designs worldwide for high availability since 2002. In 2008, Mr. Dake founded the Corosync Cluster Engine project to radically improve the performance and quality based upon real-world experiences of the openais project. He maintains this project full time with a small group of other high availability experts in the open source community.
Currently Systems Engineer at Windstream on the Systems Architecture Team, Former Senior Technical Support Engineer and later Software Quality Assurance Engineer at CodeWeavers, Inc., and Developer and unofficial Project Liaison for the Wine and ReactOS projects.
CMO at GroundWork Open Source and advisory chairperson at MonitoringForge.org, Tara brings attention to how community based innovation betters IT's lives.
Tarus Balog has over 20 years of experience managing communications networks, and much of that time was spent deploying expensive commercial management products. Since 2001, he has been involved with OpenNMS, the first real open source alternative for managing the enterprise, and he has been the project administrator since 2002.
Tobin Bradley is a strategic planner with Mecklenburg County Geospatial Information Services. He once drew a picture of a puppy that earned him 3 gold stars.
A recent addition to the Slackware development team, Vincent is an avid Open Source advocate in both the commercial arena as well as the community.
Wendy Seltzer is a Practitioner in Residence at American University Washington College of Law, researching intellectual property, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation. She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at Northeastern Law School and Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. Previously, she was a staff attorney with online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.
Wendy speaks frequently on copyright, trademark, open source, and the public interest online. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program (Perl and MythTV).
Wietse Venema is known for his software such as the TCP Wrapper and the POSTFIX mail system. He co-authored the SATAN network scanner and the Coroner's Toolkit (TCT) for forensic analysis, as well as a book on Forensic Discovery. Wietse received awards from the Free Software Foundation, the System Administrator's Guild (SAGE), the Netherlands UNIX User Group (NLUUG), as well as a Sendmail innovation award. He served a two-year term as chair of the international Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST). Wietse currently is a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson research center. After completing his Ph.D. in physics he changed career to computer science and never looked back.