WAndreas M. Antonopoulos is a British-Greek Bitcoin advocate, tech entrepreneur, and author. He is a host on the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast and a teaching fellow for the M.Sc. Digital Currencies at the University of Nicosia.
WBrian Behlendorf is an American technologist, executive, computer programmer and leading figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as president of the foundation for three years. He has served on the board of the Mozilla Foundation since 2003, Benetech since 2009 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2013.
WMontserrat Boix Piqué is a Spanish journalist, considered among the most influential women in her country. In early 2000, she created and developed the concepts of social cyberfeminism, and a year later those of feminist hacktivism. Another of her main areas of work is gender violence and communication. She has also stood out as a defender of the right to communication and citizenship rights for women. Since 1986, she has been a journalist for the Information Services of Televisión Española (TVE), in the international section.
WGrady Booch is an American software engineer, best known for developing the Unified Modeling Language (UML) with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. He is recognized internationally for his innovative work in software architecture, software engineering, and collaborative development environments.
WDouglass Read Cutting is a software designer and advocate and creator of open-source search technology. He founded Lucene and, with Mike Cafarella, Nutch, both open-source search technology projects which are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. Cutting and Cafarella are also the co-founders of Apache Hadoop.
WChris DiBona is the director of open source at Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google Code. In his former work on Google's public sector software, he looked after Google Moderator and the polling locations API and election results.
WCoraline Ada Ehmke is a software developer and open source advocate based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, the creation of Contributor Covenant, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.
WDouglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
WJon "maddog" Hall is the Board Chair for the Linux Professional Institute.
WDavid Ing is a Canadian systems scientist, business architect, management consultant, and marketing scientist. He served as President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (2011-2012).
WJim Jagielski is an American software engineer, who specializes in web, cloud and open source technologies.
WWilliam Nelson Joy is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as Chief Scientist and CTO at the company until 2003.
WMitchell David Kapor is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, invest in social impact tech startups that seek to narrow gaps in opportunity and access for underrepresented communities and attempt to eliminate barriers to full participation across the tech ecosystem. Kapor and Klein take a comprehensive approach to removing barriers in education and the workplace for all and fixing the leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline. Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Klein to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.
WKohsuke Kawaguchi is a computer programmer who is best known as the creator of the Jenkins software project. While working at Sun Microsystems, he was the primary developer of Hudson project. He is also the recipient of the 2011 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for his work on the Jenkins project.
WAlan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design.
WDan Kohn was an American serial entrepreneur and nonprofit executive who led the Linux Foundation's Public Health initiative. He was formerly the executive director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source cloud software including Kubernetes and Fluentd, through 2020. The first company he founded, NetMarket, conducted the first secure commercial transaction on the web in 1994.
WChris Lamb is an English free software developer and advocate. He held the position of Debian Project Leader from April 2017 until April 2019. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative, Software in the Public Interest, the GNOME Advisory Board, the KDE Advisory Board and is a core developer in the Reproducible Builds project which aims to prove that source code has not been tampered with to include backdoors or other malicious code.
WJohn Lilly is a venture capitalist and former CEO of Mozilla. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Code for America. He earned his B.S. in computer systems engineering and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University.
WDon Marti is a writer and advocate for free and open source software, writing for LinuxWorld and Linux Today.
WTim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
WBruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) with Eric S. Raymond. Today, he is a partner at OSS Capital.
WFernando Pérez is a Colombian-American physicist, software developer, and free software advocate. He is best known as the creator of the IPython programming environment, for which he received the 2012 Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation and for his work on Project Jupyter for which he received the 2017 ACM Software System Award. He is a fellow of the Python Software Foundation, and a founding member of the NumFOCUS organization.
WAllison Randal is a software developer and author. She was the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, a member of the board of directors for The Perl Foundation, a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2010 to 2012, and the chairman of the Parrot Foundation. She is also the lead developer of Punie, the port of Perl 1 to Parrot. She is co-author of Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and the Synopses of Perl 6. She was employed by O'Reilly Media. From August 2010 till February 2012, Randal was the Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical.
WEric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, currently in print as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
WAlvand "Alvin" Salehi is an American tech entrepreneur, attorney and angel investor. He is the co-founder of Shef, Code.gov and a former White House technology advisor under President Obama.
WMichael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative.
WBrad B. Topol is a computer scientist best known as a former member of the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors and is also an OpenStack core contributor to Keystone-Specs, Pycadf, and Heat-Translator, and a member of the OpenStack speaker bureau. Topol has a history of open-source software contributions, including Kubernetes.
WLinus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the main developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems such as Android. He also created the distributed revision control system Git and the scuba dive logging and planning software Subsurface.
WPaul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System (DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open source software principles and methodology. He also created and launched the first successful commercial anti-spam service. He authored the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises.
WWilliam Hurley, commonly known as whurley, is an American tech entrepreneur and investor who founded Chaotic Moon Studios, Honest Dollar, Strangeworks, Ecliptic Capital, and philanthropic efforts including CERN's Entrepreneurship Student Programme and Equals: The Global Partnership for Gender Equality in the Digital Age. He is an open source advocate and systems theorist, and is regularly interviewed by the press on technology and related topics.
WSeokchan "Channy" Yun is a South Korean technologist. He promotes Web standards for Web interoperability in South Korea, with a particular focus on encouraging adoption of Firefox. He was an invited expert in W3C and contributed Web standards such as HTML5 and Web cryptography API. He also founded WebStandards Korea as a member of the International Liaison Group of Web Standards Project which is an active advocate for Web standards and best practices either in their country of origin or domicile.