Brian Aker
Director of Architecture, MySQL ABBrian Aker, born August 4, 1972 in Lexington, Kentucky, USA is an open-source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system, and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database. Aker is now the Director of Architecture at MySQL AB. Aker first involved himself with the MySQL project in 1998. In 2001 he released an early prototype of MySQL with perl based functions and later went from VA Linux Systems to MySQL to lead development of the 4.1 and 5.0 versions of the MySQL Database Server.
Aker has been known to offer a Perl Certification Course at the University of Washington. He has also worked on the Virtual Hospital project, providing the Internet's first medical website, while at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics.
While not traveling and presenting at about six open source related conferences a year, he resides in Seattle, Washington. He is also the maintainer of the C client library for the Memcached server.
Brian Behlendorf
Director, Mozilla FoundationBrian 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. During that time, he co-founded and contributed heavily to the Apache Web Server Project, co-founded and supported the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) effort, and assisted several IETF working groups, particularly the HTTP standardization effort. Before starting Organic, Behlendorf was the first Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine and later HotWired, one of the first large-scale publishing Web sites. Brian is currently a Director of the Mozilla Foundation and a retired Director and President of the Apache Software Foundation.
Chander Kant
CEO & Co-founder, ZmandaChander is the CEO and a founder of Zmanda. Chander provides a unique combination of leadership in open source and data protection software. He has been involved on both the technology and business sides of open source software and was named one of the 'Top 20 Linux Luminaries' by Linux World Magazine in 2004. Prior to Zmanda, Chander founded and ran LinuxCertified, Inc., an open source product and services company. Earlier in his career, Chander was a business development executive at VERITAS software and served as a product line manager for storage software at SGI. Chander holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Danese Cooper
Chief Open Source Evangelist, Sun MicrosystemsDanese Cooper is Sun's Chief Open Source Evangelist and a leading advocate for the Free and Open Source Software movement. For 5 years she has been involved in the management of all of Sun's award-winning open source projects, including the landmark OpenOffice.org project (which has enabled the Linux Desktop revolution and many of the recent announcements by world governments that are switching from single-vendor lock-in systems). She is also a board member of the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org). She speaks and consults extensively throughout the world on Free and Open Source software issues.
David Axmark
Co-Founder, MySQL ABDavid Axmark is one of the founders of MySQL AB and has been working with MySQL since before it had a name. His involvement with MySQL began with the idea to make an open source SQL RDBMS to replace an old terminal-based tool named UNIREG.
Dr. Inder Singh
CEO and Chairman, LynuxWorksDr. Inder M. Singh is the CEO and Chairman of LynuxWorks. He founded Excelan, an early leader in local area networks in 1982 and served as its chairman, CEO and president until 1985. Excelan later merged with Novell. Dr. Singh was a co-founder of Kalpana, which pioneered Ethernet switching technology, and was one of Cisco's early acquisitions. Dr. Singh is a director of PacketStream and PocketPass, and has served on the boards of Mylex, Kalpana, Omnitel, Integrated Media Systems, Univation, Vivix, and Eon Systems. Dr. Singh is Board Chairman and ELC President for the Embedded Linux Consortium. In addition to his experience with high technology start up companies, Dr. Singh has prior management and technical experience with Zilog, where he headed the Networking and Advanced Systems Development Group. At Zilog, he was the architect of the Z8000 UNIX-based product line. Dr. Singh has also held positions at Amdahl, where he was a Senior Computer Architect, Gartner Research, the Yale Computer Center, and Ontel. He holds Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in computer science from Yale University, and an MSEE from Polytechnic Institute of New York.
FC Kohli
Ex-Deputy Chairman, TCSA visionary and pioneer by nature, Faqir Chand Kohli is acknowledged as the ‘Father of the Indian Software Industry’. He is a fellow of IEEE USA, IEE UK, Institution of Engineers India, Computer Society of India and many others. He has received his Doctorate in Engineering (Honoris Causa) from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1990, from Robert Gordon University in 2000, Aberdeen, U.K., University of Roorkee, UP in 2000, from IIT Bombay in 2004, Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2004 and IIT Kanpur 2006. He has received many awards including the prestigious Dadabhai Naoroji Memorial Award in 2001 and was conferred the Padma Bhusan in the year 2002.
F C Kohli worked both in the US and India, before joining the Tata Consultancy Services in India as the general manager in September 1969. In 1974, he was made the director-in-charge and in 1994 deputy chairman. Be it the propagation of computerisation in India at a time when no one realised its potential, or bringing the benefits of IT to India’s rural masses through computer based Adult Literacy programme, Kohli saw IT as an instrument of national development. He has been working on advancing engineering education at undergraduate level to world standards to create a large pool of students for undertaking graduate studies and research. With IIT Bombay and Ministry of Information Technology he initiated the project to graduate 3000 Microelectronic engineers at Masters level. He indicated the need for IT use within the country in all spheres of activity some years back and this has taken shape in terms of affordable computers and Open-source software in Indian Languages.
Klaus Knopper
Creator, KnoppixKlaus Knopper is the creator of Knoppix, a well-known live CD Linux distribution. He received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology, co-founded LinuxTag in 1996 and has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998. He also teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences.
Louis Suárez-Potts
Community Manager, OpenOffice.orgLouis Suárez-Potts is the Community Manager of OpenOffice.org since its inception and chair of the OpenOffice.org Communty Council, as well as the senior manager for community development at CollabNet, Louis Suárez-Potts holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on an in-depth examination of the difference corporate-sponsored open source projects have made to the logic and practice of open source.
Mark Shuttleworth
Founder, Canonical LtdMark founded the Ubuntu project in 2004 and continues today as an active member of the Technical Board and the Community Council. He works with product teams at Canonical to help shape their strategy and user experience.
He studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation.
He moved to London in 2001, and began preparing for the First African in Space mission, training in Star City and Khazakstan. In April 2002 Mark flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station.
