Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is Founding International and Managing Editor of First Monday, the on-line journal of the Internet, and Senior Researcher at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) at the United Nations University, the Netherlands. He has written about the economics of free software since 1994, and has led several major research projects on the topic, funded by the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation and the Dutch government.

Brian Aker is the Director of Technology for MySQL. At MySQL he helps set direction for technology and looks for opportunies to harness and shape the MySQL database for efforts in Web, OEM, and Telephony. In his copious amounts of free time he works on Apache and Perl modules, and hacks on the Asterisk Telephony System (hence never has a working home phone number). In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, Splunk, and Slashdot. He lives in Seattle with his dog Rosalynd.

Tom Anderson works as a design automation scientist for Agilent Technologies. His current work project is to invent new circuit simulation capabilities for Agilent engineers. On his own time he builds electronics projects and is an author for MAKE magazine, and creates Open Source Hardware for Quaketronics.

CEO, Mozilla Messaging Director, Python Software Foundation Python book author ex-CTO/VP Engineering of ActiveState

• Founder and CEO of AGNITAS AG (www.agnitas.com, www.openemm.org)
• Founder and Managing Director of Adamatis GmbH (www.adamatis.de)
• Vice President of the German direct marketing association DDV (www.ddv.de)
• Board Member of the German based Open Source Business Foundation (www.osbf.de)
• Author of the German blog “Open Source Inside” (www.os-inside.de)

For many years a Perl Bioinformatics programmer in Philadelphia for a major pharma company helping scientists load, analyze and view their data. Now doing similar things for people selling stuff over the phone.

Jono Bacon works at Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager and works to grow, scale and lead the world-wide Ubuntu community. Bacon previously had a background in journalism (writing for over 12 publications and three books) and also worked as a professional Open Source advocate at the UK government funded OpenAdvantage. He is a prominent member of the Open Source community, co-founder and presenter of LugRadio, contributor to projects such as Jokosher, KDE and GNOME, and an active musician, playing in a metal band and recording his own solo material. He lives in the England.

Ahmad Baitalmal, Etelos Chief Product Architect, brings more than 20 years of information systems experience to Etelos, Inc. and has successfully brought six versions of the Etelos Application Server™, Etelos Development Environment™ and other innovative products to market. Ahmad’s unique approach to solving customer issues is instrumental in directing product development and deployment for Etelos, Inc.. He is an Open Source Software advocate and has contributed to various popular projects including the X1000 Linux distro and WifiRadar for the Gnome Desktop Environment.

Nick Barcet has joined Canonical in September 2007 as Ubuntu Server Product Manager, focusing on bringing together the requirements that our users have in order to make our server product the easiest platform to deploy in business, enterprises and internet data centers. Nick has been involved in the open source community has a hobby since 1998 and professionally for the past seven years as a consultant, architect and technical marketing person at some famous names in the software and hardware industry.

Phil Bartholo leads developer outreach programs on behalf of Sun Microsystems for the OpenJDK and Mobile and Embedded open source communities. Phil has broad experience with Java SE, ME, and EE Technologies as a software developer and engineering manager for Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Capital One. In addition, he is a part time Java programming instructor at Foothill College.

Pierre Baudracco, 12 years of experience in Open Source, is in the board of LINAGORA and former CEO of AliaSource. He is the main developer and maintainer of ththe open source project called OBM (Open Business Management) created in 1998 (Email Groupware solution).

Jean-Paul is a systems engineer at KnowledgeTree where he is responsible for looking after the ongoing architecture and development of the KnowledgeTreeLive software as a service application.

He has been involved in deploying and architecting open source systems for the past eight years. When not looking for ways to leverage open source technologies for businesses, he spends his time looking for innovative ways to utilize ICT’s for education. He was awarded the Youth and ICT Award for these endeavors at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005.

Anthony has been involved in the open-source community for more than a decade, largely working in Python and, in the last few years, on Python. He’s worked in the Internet area and in the telco space, where he gets to exercise his incredibly short attention span by working on far far too many things at once. He’s written or contributed to more open source projects than he can remember – mostly related to networking and protocol implementations.

He’s currently the release manager for Python. This is much less glamorous than you might think. After a number of years working for a travel-based telephone company, he’s recently started working for Google Australia.

Anthony’s spoken at a number of conferences, including a keynote at linux.conf.au 2008, at each of the 4 OSDC conferences held so far, and presented Effective Python Programming at OSCON 2005.

Software Engineer & Computer Scientist at LBNL with interests in software development methodologies, distributed systems, scientific/collaborative software development, computer security & open source technologies.

Currently working on the data acquisition component of the IceCube Neutrino detector being constructed at the South Pole.

A board member at CollabNet and the Mozilla Foundation, but mostly now a free agent on all things open source.

George Belotsky is Chief Scientist at CinematX Digital, a company exploring the combination of virtualization and distributed video. He has done extensive work on high performance Internet servers as well as hard real time and embedded systems. His technology interests include Python, C++ and Linux. George has written articles for O’Reilly Network, LinuxWorld and the Linux Journal. His article on C++ memory management made the best of 2003 list on O’Reilly ONLamp. George has also presented at PyCon, LinuxWorld and other venues.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann is a long-time contributor to various PHP projects, including PHP itself. He is the developer of PHPUnit and offers consulting, training, and coaching services to help enterprises improve the quality assurance process for their PHP-based software projects. Sebastian also works for eZ Systems AS on the Workflow Engine for the eZ Components.

In his free time, Sebastian likes to hack on Open Source software and to take photographs, preferably while travelling the world.

Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the Core Team of the world-spanning open source database project PostgreSQL. He has been involved with various open source projects since 1998, including SPI, OpenOffice.org, LedgerSMB, Bricolage and OpenBRR and is on the selection committee for OSCON, Sun Microsystems employs Josh in its Database Technolgy Group as the strategic lead for Sun’s PostgreSQL for Solaris product offering. He also makes pottery.

Michael Bernstein has been a member of the Zope developer community since 1999, co-authored the ‘Zope Bible’ published by Hungry Minds in 2001, and is currently an independent contractor based in Las Vegas. He’s been known to dabble in logo and identity design, and is currently working on a startup code-named ‘Rogue Mountain’.

Zaheda Bhorat is an Open Source and Open Standards advocate in her current role at Google. In the early days of open source she managed the OpenOffice.org project and community and took the project from inception to a 1.0 release. With her experience of building communities of contributers, she created one of the first open source marketing projects with a global team of passionate volunteers to promote both open source and launch the office suite. Zaheda has a passion for applying open source processes to more than code, and has engaged conributors in localisation communities, education and adoption for Free and Open Source software, particularly in the developing/emerging markets. Zaheda has over 15 years software industry experience, holds a BSc in Computer Science and now lives in California.

Ben Bleything is a Rubyist and amateur hardware hacker from Portland, Oregon. Ben Bleything is a Rubyist and hardware hacker, having come to Ruby by way of PHP and Perl. He has been slinging Ruby since 2005, when the sweet seductive voice of Rails called his name. Since then he has broken into the wild world of pure Ruby, for which he gets paid real money. Ben resides in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

Christopher Blizzard has been with the Mozilla project for the better part of the decade. He maintained the GTK+ front end in Mozilla for a number of years as a contributor but recently joined the Corporation as a full time Mobile and Open Source Evangelist.

Marcus Börger is a specialist in C, C++, databases, UML, XML, and of course PHP. To the PHP community, he is also known as helly. As a core developer, he contributes a lot to PHP and focuses on the new OO features of PHP 5 and Zend Engine 2. Marcus has been working on all sorts of things for over 15 years. Previously, he worked as a freelancer, where he consulted for Ford Motor Company in their European Research department on Navigation and beyond. Now at Google Zurich, he works on, well, Internet stuff.

Carsten started with Mozilla as a QA Community Member with Nightly Build Testing and manual Test Execution. Then he was hired by Mozilla as Team Member of the QA Team to work on Test Execution Tasks. He is located in Germany.

Joe Born is the CEO and founder of Neuros Technology, an open source consumer electronics company supported by an active developer community and with offices in the US, Taiwan and China. Neuros, in partnership with chipmaker Texas Instruments, is pioneering the development of an open platform for next generation internet based set-top boxes.

Joe Born’s first company, Digital Innovations manufactured consumer electronics sold in over 35,000 outlets worldwide, and to date has sold over 7 million units of its initial product, the SkipDoctor.

Joe has spoken about open source electronics and overseas development to groups ranging from the Ohio Linux Fest, Linux Desktop Summit, LUGradio Live, to Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and Linuxworld. Joe Born’s Blog is open.neurostechnology.com

Niel Bornstein specializes in data center automation and open source strategy. A graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with degrees in Applied Psychology and Management, he spent 15 years working on corporate and commercial client-server, N-tier, and web-hosted applications, in an impressively random assortment of industries, before moving on to consulting. He is an occasional conference speaker and the author of . NET and XML and Mono: A Developer’s Notebook (with Edd Dumbill), as well as having written a number of articles for the O’Reilly Network.

Niel lives in Marietta, Georgia, with his wife, the former Dawn Kelly McLaughlin; two children, Nicholas Tae-Hyun and Olivia Hee-Eun; an array of animals, including Chester (Golden Retriever), Winston Butler (black-and-white domestic shorthair), Sesame Kung-Pao (seal point Ragdoll), and a rotating stock of small fishes; and a few glowing boxes.

Jos is a long time perl developer, testing bigot and QA zealot. He’s responsible for several dozen CPAN modules, including CPANPLUS and Archive::Tar and contributed roughly 2% of the code in the current perl core.

He currently works as manager of the Database Group at RIPE NCC, one of the five global Internet Registries, at their office in Amsterdam.

Ronald is a Senior Consultant with MySQL Inc based in the US. Ronald brings 9 years of MySQL experience with 19 years experience in RDBMS products, enterprise data architecture, large systems development and Internet Web technologies.

Jim Brandt is a systems architect at the University at Buffalo and Vice President of the Perl Foundation. He’s co-author of “mod_perl 2 User’s Guide” from OnyxNeon Press, an editor and contributor for “The Perl Review,” and has written for Perl.com. He has presented at many conferences including YAPC::NA and the Gartner Open Source Summit.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray

David Brewer is the Lead Systems Developer at Second Story Interactive Studios. He has over nine years of experience with Web programming using a variety of platforms and languages. He specializes in the creation of collection databases, web-based administrative consoles for managing them, and the front-end systems used to present them.

Ryan Carmelo Briones is a Server Monkey / Code Samurai for The Edgecase, LLC in Columbus, OH. A product of the Internet Age, Ryan has spent much of the last 10 years “poking” at the HTTP in as many ways possible working for Internet Services Providers, Non-Profit Organizations and Web Startups. Ryan currently practices agile software development in the form of Ruby and Rails development, but in times long since past you might have seen him cutting his teeth on Perl and PHP.

My name is Joe Brockmeier, though most of my friends and colleagues call me Zonker. I’m a Linux geek, and have been using Linux since 1996 when I discovered Slackware Linux, and have been working with Linux and writing about it since about 1999.

I’ve written for Linux Magazine, Sys Admin, IBM developerWorks, Linux Weekly News, Enterprise Linux Magazine, NewsFactor, ComputorEdge, Corante, ZDNet, Unix Review, NewsForge.com, Linux.com, and a few other publications that slip my mind at the moment. I’ve also written and contributed to books about Slackware Linux, DocBook, Linux Networking, and other open source topics.

After covering Linux and open source for nine years as a tech journalist, I was pleased to have the opportunity to join Novell as openSUSE Community Manager. My job here will be to serve as an advocate for the openSUSE community to Novell, to make sure the openSUSE community has the tools it needs to function and grow, to put the word out about openSUSE and what’s going on within the project, and to promote openSUSE.

David Bryan is one of the founders of Silicon Mechanics and the company’s product development visionary. He guided the development of key innovations, including the online cluster configurator, blade configurator, and dynamic power calculator applications. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.

Tim Bunce is best known as the author and maintainer of the Perl DBI module, the standard database interface for Perl since 1994. He has contributed to the development of the Perl language and many of its core modules, and was responsible for the 5.4.x series of maintenance releases.

As the founder and CTO of Data-Plan Services, he provides Perl, database, performance, and scaling consultancy services to an international client base. Prior to that we was Technical Director (CTO) of IG in the UK where he was awarded by British Telecom for his role in the rapid development of their Call Management Information service, a system implemented in Perl.

He is co-author, along with Alligator Descartes, of Programming the Perl DBI, the definitive book on DBI, published by O’Reilly Media.

A popular and effective speaker, he has delivered tutorials and sessions for many years at OSCON and other conferences and workshops.

Alan Carter built a gelled team by accident in 1987. After 20 years of trial and error, guiding teams at organizations like British Telecom, Sequent, ICL, UK Defence Research Agency, BNR and Utell International he finally thinks he knows how to bake a cake.

He currently lives and works in Brussels, but prefers to telework from the Spanish Mediterranean when he can. His Geek Code is:

GIT/Pds:a+C+UL++P-E-W+NK-wO-M+VPS+PEY+PGPt+5+X-Rtvb++DI+D—-Ge-h+rz+

Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Development Team since 1998. He has been developing, writing about, and teaching on Open Source since the late 90’s. Currently employed by Likewise as a Samba and Open Source developer, Gerald has written books for SAMS Publishing and for O’Reilly Publishing.

Based in Los Angeles, Michael has been developing Web-based applications for nine years. He is currently the principal software architect at Brand Up, an LA area-based Internet and technology marketing firm. For the past two years Michael has been filling the void of good Open source HTTP Push (Comet) servers. He is the creator of Orbited, an Open Source, scalable, cross-language, and cross-platform HTTP server optimized for long-lasting idle connections that allow distributed HTTP Push communication. He has presented Orbited as well as additional theoretical work at multiple web development conferences. He shares his expertise in bi-weekly articles for the technical publication Comet Daily.

Francesco Cesarini is the founder and CTO of Erlang Training and Consulting. He has used Erlang on a daily basis for almost 15 years, having started his career as an intern at Ericsson’s computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson’s Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of OTP, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecom applications. In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Training and Consulting. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training and systems development. Francesco has worked in major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and in his role as CTO, is currently leading the development and consulting teams at ETC. He is also the co-author of Practical Erlang Programming, a book soon to be published by O’Reilly.

If Zend puts your picture on a deck of cards, you’ve either arrived in the PHP world or are a terrorist. Terry Chay is a PHP Terrorist. He spends most of his free time trying to keep Tagged, a open social networking system, from collapsing, as their Software Architect. When he isn’t doing that, he’s trying to get as much power as you’ll give him saying outrageous things on his blog.

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Rick Clark works for Canonical as Engineering Manager for the Ubuntu Server Edition. Rick has been involved with Linux as a user/admin/developer since the 1990’s. He only recently broke free from his previous life as a Security Architect/Engineer for large financial and pharmaceutical companies, to take an active role in the Open Source community. Rick is the father of 18 month old twin girls, and a rabid hockey fan. He lives in St. Charles, Missouri.

Over ten years in the industry working on cutting-edge, buzz-word compliant technologies. In a past life, was designer and lead implementor of the Apache Xerces2 XML parser. Now builds large-scale Ajax web applications.

At Jaspersoft Tim manages all aspects of community development, community communication, and JasperForge.org systems development and operations. Before JasperSoft, Tim held international sales and marketing management positions with divisions of Fair Isaac, GEC/Marconi, and Siemens. Previously Tim held senior marketing positions at CollabNet, Radius, and Sun Microsystems.

John Coggeshall is a Senior Member of Zend Technologies’ Global Services Group where he provides professional services to clients across North America (and sometimes beyond). He got started with PHP in 1997 and is the author of three published books and over 100 articles on PHP technologies with some of the biggest names in the industry such as Sams Publishing, Apress and O’Reilly. John also is a active contributor to the PHP core as the author of the tidy extension, a member of the Zend Education Advisory Board, and frequent speaker at PHP-related conferences worldwide. His web site, http://www.coggeshall.org/ is an excellent resource for any PHP developer.

Ben is a member of Google’s Open Source Program Office, working on projects to promote the spread of open source software both inside and outside the company. He is a technical lead for Google Code’s open source project hosting service, available at http://code.google.com. He helped port Subversion to Google’s Bigtable technology, which now runs across numerous machines and serves over 80,000 open source repositories. Prior to Google, Ben spent five years with Collabnet as one of the original designers and founders of the Subversion project. He is still active in the Subversion community and is also a co-author of the O’Reilly book “Version Control with Subversion”. He received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and enjoys speaking with Brian Fitzpatrick at various conferences on topics both serious and irreverent.

George Conard is Director of the Mifos Initiative at Grameen Foundation, leading the team building an open source software platform for the global microfinance industry. A recognized expert on the use of technology to enable the growth and evolution of microfinance and other means of alleviating poverty, George frequently speaks at industry events and advises key stakeholders in the microfinance community on the effective use of technology. Prior to his work on the Mifos Initiative, George lived in Rwanda and worked to establish the Grameen Foundation’s Village Phone program, culminating in the formation of Village Phone Rwanda SARL, a for-profit joint venture between Grameen Foundation and telecommunications company MTN. George served on the board of Village Phone Rwanda and is a founding board member of the Seattle-based non-profit theater company Shady Lane Productions. George brings more than 15 years of technology management experience to the team, including seven years with Microsoft in international marketing and product development roles, and has consulted for organizations including Microsoft, the Asia Foundation, and Digital Partners.

Damian Conway is an internationally renowned speaker, author, and trainer, and a prominent contributor to the Perl community. Currently he runs Thoughtstream, an international IT training company that provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia. Most of his spare time is spent working with Larry Wall on the design and explication of the Perl 6 programming language. He has a PhD in Computer Science and is an honorary Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, Australia.

Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Cooper worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun’s chief open source evangelist and founded Sun’s Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Secretary & Treasurer. In March 2005, Cooper joined Intel to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.

Paul Cooper has worked as a developer and advocate for open source software for over 10 years. Currently he is the Business Development Manager at OpenedHand. Prior to joining OpenedHand Paul was the Assistant Director of OpenAdvantage which he and former colleague Scott Thompson founded in 2003 at the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University). OpenAdvantage was the first and only independently-funded vendor-neutral Open Source solutions centre in the UK. Previously he has worked as a web developer, programmer, database administrator, systems adminstrator, IT gofer, administration assistant, bouncer, box maker, sports coach, bicycle mechanic, musician, and paper boy.

Rod Cope is the CTO and Founder of OpenLogic, Inc. He is a Sun Certified Java Architect with 25 years of software development experience, including 12 years of Java. He has developed Rails applications, J2EE applications, Swing GUIs, small device code, and nearly everything in between. For the last six years, he has been working on OpenLogic Enterprise, a supported collection of over 350 Open Source projects for enterprise developers. In particular, Rod has used Ruby, Rails, Groovy, JRuby, JBoss, Hibernate, AspectJ, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Ant, and many other Open Source projects extensively in commercial applications.

Rod has spoken on Groovy, JRuby, Rails, Hibernate, and other topics at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, JavaOne, the No Fluff, Just Stuff Java Symposium series, and Java User Groups around the country. He holds both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Software Engineering from the University of Louisville.

Bruno Cornec is Engineer of the French Ecole Centrale de Lyon. (1987) He has been managing various Unix systems since 1987 and Linux since 1993 (0.99pl14). Bruno first worked 8 years around Software Engineering and Configuration Management Syst ems. Since 1996, he is Linux Solution Consultant and Open Source Evangelist, initially for an HP reseller and now for Hewlett Packard directly in the HP/Intel Solution Center.

Bruno is also Linux and Open Source Profession Lead for EMEA at Hewlett Packard.

Bruno is a Mandriva contributor since 2003. Since Sept 2005, Bruno has taken the maintenance of the MondoRescue project (GPL disaste r recovery solution) Since 2006 is a also leading the dploy.org initiative and contributes to the LinuxCOE pr oject.

As part of his work he has made numerous presentations for Solution Linux in France, Lib re Software Meeting, NordU, Linux World UK, Linux Expo Milano, LCA 2007 around various t opics (High Availability, Deployment solutions, System management, ...)

Outside computers, Bruno also likes early and baroque music, singing and playing the rec order. He’s married and father of 3 kids.

Artist Hunter studied Studio Art at Trinity University with Liz Ward. He lives and works in Austin, Texas. He is co-director of the Open Doors Art Collective. He has curated 5 exhibitions with this contemporary art group at spaces such as The Dallas Contemporary, MASS Gallery and Austin’s Dougherty Arts Center. Open Doors has received a City of Austin cultural grant and an Austin Chronicle nomination for Best Group Exhibition in 2005.

His work has been a part of Austin Museum of Art’s 22 to Watch triennial and Arthouse’s New American Talent. His installations, proposal works, drawings and sculptures are owned by collectors in New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Houston.

Web Developer Before becoming a successful web entrepreneur, Hunter worked for Giles Design and REAL Software.

In 2004, Hunter began work as a freelance web developer specializing in ecommerce and open source consulting. In the fall of 2006, Hunter founded Ponticlaro Inc., a full-service creative studio to better serve his international client base.

Selena Deckelmann bikes herself to work everyday at Chris King Precision Components, a bicycle parts manufacturer in Portland, OR, where she is Information Systems Manager. She is User Group Liason for the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. She currently leads PDXPUG, a PostgreSQL Users Group, and is helping start a programming group, Code-n-Splode, whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. In her spare time, she collects eggs from her chickens, gardens and occasionally mixes drinks for her local Perl Mongers group.

Adar has been a VMware employee for about 2.5 years, working primarily on the VMware Tools. His FOSS activity has primarily revolved around the open-vm-tools project, though he did help develop a filesystem for the Linux kernel.

Michael is an Oregon resident who moved to Latvia after leaving MandrakeSoft SA. He is a founding member of the Latvian Open Source Association (LAKA.lv) and is Program Manager of the BSD Fund, a program of the Oregon-based Linux Fund.

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Mountain View, Ca based Google, Inc. His job includes managing open source related compliance and outreach programs for the company. More information about Google’s open source program can be found at http://code.google.com/opensource

Before joining Google, Mr. DiBona was an editor/author for the hugely popular online website slashdot.org and he is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He co-edited the award winning essay compilations “Open Sources” and “Open Sources 2.0” for O’Reilly and writes for a great number of publications. He was briefly the Linux guy on TechTV, starred in Floss Weekly and speaks on a variety of open source issues internationally.

Michael Dory is a designer, artist and researcher currently focusing on ubiquitous computing, game design and human computer interaction, and a recent graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

He’s previously worked with IBM, Nikon, Sony and Vision Education & Media on projects ranging from public relations and peer media strategy to interaction design and product prototyping. His personal and collaborative projects, including including the audio graffiti project Concrete Crickets and networked social game Socialbomb have appeared in/on/at the New York Times, National Public Radio, Conflux Festival, BoingBoing, and MAKE Magazine.

Gavin Doughtie is a front end developer on Google’s Picasa Web Albums. He started and ran the LA Java Users’ Group and has worked on the development teams of the two California Startup Weekends so far.

Edd Dumbill is co-chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. He is also the creator of Expectnation, the software powering O’Reilly conferences.

Darren Duncan is a developer of applications and databases, has written several CPAN modules, and participates in Perl 6 language development. Darren’s life’s work is to build consumer-useable ontological database solutions for accurately organizing and easily sharing the world’s knowledge over the long term, particularly scientific, historical, and genealogical knowledge. Darren is interested in general information management and epistemology.

Robin Dunn, the creator and maintainer of wxPython, has been working in the software industry for 20 years on a wide variety of applications. He discovered both wxWidgets and Python in 1995 while looking for a cross platform toolkit for C++ and has used Python and wx whenever possible since then. At the 2002 O’Reilly Open Source Convention Robin was awarded the ActiveState Programmers’ Choice Award. This award, determined by votes from fellow Python programmers, is a testament to Robin’s work ethic and valuable contribution to the Python community. For the past five years Robin’s work on wxPython has been supported by the Open Source Applications Foundation. Robin is also the co-author of the first book about wxPython, wxPython In Action. Robin spends most of his time at home in Vancouver, Washington, USA.

Mr. Dym brings to OpSource 25 years of successful marketing, business development, and technical operations experience gained from the senior executive positions he has held at fast-paced technology companies ranging from venture backed start-ups to global public enterprises. His broad experience includes active involvement in successful liquidity events including IPO, acquisitions, and sale.

Christer Edwards is currently a Linux Instructor and coureware developer for Guru Labs, LC. He has been active in documentation and community development areas of Ubuntu since Ubuntu 5.04. His main focus in 2007 was US Teams, building Ubuntu communities in all 50 states. In 2008 he plans include Ubuntu user education, involvement and LTS improvements.

He identifies areas of opportunity for technological solutions to achieve business goals. Focused on developing sustainable models for excellence within the open source community, Matt’s current priority is to attain proficiency in e-commerce law to enable the launch of a startup in Fall 2008. The startup is an experiment to validate a novel business model that will leverage the diversity of free software.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea works on Flickr hacking on technological solutions to social problems.

As developer of the MythTV based consumer appliance myPVR, Steven has leveraged his over 10 years experience with Linux, and 15 years experience of FOSS. OpenMedia was one of the first companies in the world to offer a truly consumer ready appliance based on MythTV.

His passion for FOSS comes from both his development and operational experience. As well as co-running OpenMedia he manages the IBM NZ Linux operational team, and looks after a number of large enterprise customers in the Asia Pacific market. This helps provide an interesting bridge between the contrasting worlds of the consumer versus large scale business.

Steven gives talks on FOSS at the Auckland Linux User Group, and has given presentations and organised tutorials for many of his employers including Optimation Limited and IBM NZ. He has also presented at a number of conferences including 2007 Open Source Developers Conference in Brisbane, Linux.conf.au 2008 in Melbourne, and Auckland BarCamp.

Audrey is a Ruby developer, community organizer, and crafty geek based in Portland, OR. She works for Elevated Rails. She is also a board member for Legion of Tech, an umbrella organization for several local technology events, and an active member of the Portland Ruby Brigade, and of Dorkbot PDX.

Her other activities include knitting, photography, and geeking out on the meaning of location in a highly-networked world.

Colin fights information entropy on a daily basis using a wide arsenal of machine learning and semantic analytic techniques. The results of his efforts appear as millions of assertions in Freebase. Prior to joining Metaweb, Colin helped users organize their world through his work on the IRIS semantic desktop project at SRI.

Randall Farmer is Yet Another Perl and JavaScript hacker for We Also Walk Dogs, where he develops Web applications for political nonprofits like MoveOn.org, Rock the Vote, and the ONE Campaign. He worked on MoveOn’s 2004, 2006, and 2007 get-out-the-vote campaigns, which contacted millions of voters in key swing states and Congressional districts. His technical interests include MySQL optimization, JSONP APIs for building cross-site widgets, and JavaScript tools and frameworks.

J Aaron Farr is an entrepreneur and open source evangelist. He currently serves as a board member of the Apache Software Foundation, having contributed to the open source Apache Avalon, Excalibur, Incubator, and Labs projects. His prior professional experience includes developing software for Sony Electronics and Siemens Medical Systems.

Paul Fenwick is the managing director of Perl Training Australia, and has been teaching computer science for over a decade. He is a regular presenter at conferences and user-groups throughout Australia, where he is well-known for his humour and off-beat topics.

Jon Ferraiolo manages operations and leads various activities at the OpenAjax Alliance. Jon is an employee of IBM, working within its IBM’s Emerging Internet Technologies group. Before joining IBM, Jon worked at Adobe for 13 years where he was an architect, engineering manager and product manager on multiple products and where he participated in various standards activities.

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist at Day Software and VP of the Apache HTTP server project, has co-founded a dozen open source projects, defined the REST architectural style, authored standards that define much of the World Wide Web, and chaired the Apache Software Foundation through its first three years.

Ed Finkler has been a web developer for 13 years, the last 6 of those as the Web and Security Archive Administrator of CERIAS at Purdue University. In recent years his interests have turned to web application security, especially with open source technology. He is is a member of the PHP Security Consortium and creator of the PHPSecInfo auditing tool for PHP environments. Ed has also worked in Rich Internet Application development, and his Twitter client Spaz was awarded “Best HTML Community App” in the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. Finkler also studies interface design and usability.

Justin Fitzhugh is the Director of Information Technology for the Mozilla Corporation. He responsible for all Mozilla’s production and corporate infrastructure, including serving the Firefox product to over 150 million users. In addition to Firefox distribution, his team designs, implements and supports the infrastructure for one of the largest open source organizations in the world. Some of the larger web presences run by the Mozilla IT team include the Mozilla automatic update system, addons.mozilla.org, mozilla.com, breakpad, and many others. Prior to Mozilla, Justin managed Macromedia’s global datacenter environment. He spends his spare time as an avid pilot, snowboarder and father

Brian Fitzpatrick started his career at Google in 2005 as the first software engineer hired in the Chicago office. Brian leads Google’s Chicago engineering efforts and also serves as engineering manager for Google Code and internal advisor for Google’s open source efforts. Prior to joining Google, Brian was a senior software engineer on the version control team at CollabNet, working on Subversion, cvs2svn, and CVS. He has also worked at Apple Computer as a senior engineer in their professional services division, developing both client and web applications for Apple’s largest corporate customers.

Brian has been an active open source contributor for over ten years. After years of writing small open source programs and bugfixes, he became a core Subversion developer in 2000, and then the lead developer of the cvs2svn utility. He was nominated as a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2002 and spent two years as the ASF’s VP of Public Relations. Brian has written numerous articles and given many presentations on a wide variety of subjects from version control to software development, including co-writing “Version Control with Subversion” as well as chapters for “Unix in a Nutshell” and “Linux in a Nutshell.”

Brian has an A.B. in Classics from Loyola University Chicago with a major in Latin, a minor in Greek, and a concentration in Fine Arts and Ceramics. Despite growing up in New Orleans and working for Silicon Valley companies for most of his career, he decided years ago that Chicago was his home and stubbornly refuses to move to California.

Karl Fogel is an open source developer and author. After working on CVS and writing “Open Source Development With CVS” (Coriolis, 1999, cvsbook.com), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote “Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project” (O’Reilly, 2005, producingoss.com). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google, he left to become editor of QuestionCopyright.org. He writes and speaks regularly on copyright reform and on the application of open source principles to areas outside software.

Brian has been programming with Ruby since BR (before-Rails), which means practically since the dark ages. He has worked with several companies doing web development with Rails. In December 2006 he began contributing to Rubinius, launching the effort to write executable specs for Ruby. He is now employed by Engine Yard to work full-time on Rubinius. In the 10 hours per week not spent on Rubinius, he’s probably snowboarding on beautiful Mt Hood. He also jots a random thought or two at blog.brightredglow.com.

Sara Ford is the Program Manager for CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Previously, she worked on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft for 6 years. Her life-long goal is to become a 97-year-old weightlifter, so she can be featured on the local news.

John Forsyth has been with Symbian since its inception and has held a number of roles shaping the design and development of Symbian over the past ten years. In his role as VP Strategy, John is responsible for leading the development of Symbian’s business strategy, and the overall future for Symbian OS as an open mobile software platform. With the planned open sourcing of Symbian OS, John is leading Symbian’s efforts to create and nurture a community that will successfully deliver the innovations of thousands of individual developers into hundreds of millions of handsets worldwide.

Dawn M. Foster is currently the Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software, a collaboration software company in Portland, OR. She has more than 12 years of experience in technology and software with expertise in open source software, web 2.0, social media, blogging, and community building.

Dawn is the author of Fast Wonder: An Open Culture Blog and is currently working on a book for O’Reilly Media about the Art of Community. She organizes a monthly Portland BarCamp Meetup event for local technology employees, is an organizer for the Portland BarCamp event, and helps organize Ignite Portland. She is a co-founder and Chair of Legion of Tech, a non profit organization focused on providing free events by and for the Portland Technology Community.

Previously, Dawn worked at Compiere, Intel, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to open source strategist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University and a master’s degree in business administration from Ashland University.

brian d foy is the co-author of Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl, the author of Mastering Perl, the publisher of The Perl Review, the author of dozens of Perl modules, and a Perl trainer and consultant for Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.

Nat co-founded Ximian in 1999, was a co-founder of the GNOME Foundation and the foundation’s chairman for 2 years, and has been a long-time contributor to open source. In 2003, Ximian was purchased by Novell. At Novell, he has held overall responsibility for the Linux Desktop and the GroupWise collaboration product.

Today Nat is Novell’s Chief Technology and Strategy Officer for Linux, responsible for the company’s Linux strategy. He runs the SUSE Incubation Team, a creative group of talented programmers doing exploratory development and experimental prototyping to help shape the future of Linux.

Nat holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT and enjoys kayaking in Venice.

Educated at VUT, Brno (MSc, 1992), Regent College, Vancouver (MCS, 1996) and University of Edinburgh (PhD, 2000), Tomas’ involvement with Free Software began in early 2000 with contributions to the AbiWord project. At present he is employed by OpenedHand, crafting software for embedded hardware, such as the Nokia Internet tablets and the Vernier LabQuest device. Most recently, he has been involved in work on the next generation of the Matchbox Window Manager and the Clutter toolkit.

Aaron is a multifaceted entrepreneur and technology advocate. Aaron co-founded MindTouch and has guided MindTouch from a grass roots open source project to the number one of the most popular open source enterprise applications in the world with an impressive customer list of Fortune 500 corporations, mid-market companies and government agencies.

Wez Furlong is the Director of Engineering at Message Systems. In the PHP world, Furlong is a PHP Core developer, the so-called “King of PECL,” the PHP Extension Community Library, and helps to maintain the php.net server infrastructure. Furlong has authored and maintains a number of PHP extensions, and designed and implemented the PHP Streams layer. Furlong currently resides in Columbia, Maryland with his wife, son, and two dogs.

Gopi Ganapathy is Founder, President & CEO of Essentia, a product and services company focused on open source platforms, online customer experience and software as a service. He also serves as a partner in MNC Group, a diversified investment and technology incubation firm. A successful repeat entrepreneur and seasoned executive, he was a founder of Enlite Networks serving as it’s President and CEO from inception in 1999 until it’s acquisition by CollabNet in 2003. At CollabNet, Gopi served as the President/CEO of CollabNet India and as its Vice President of Engineering leading early deployments of many well known open source projects like Open Office, Java and Subversion on distributed software development environments. He has held executive positions in marketing, services and engineering since the early 90s in well known silicon valley companies including Cadence Design Systems [CDN], SVR and AMD. Gopi has a Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin with numerous patents and publications.

A 16 year old from the US, Elizabeth developed an early interest in open source, installing her first Debian machine (with some help!) at age 9. Since then, her main computing interest has been graphics manipulation and digital art. Aside from computers, Elizabeth is a dedicated student who is passionate about music, and enjoys reading comic books.

Sulamita Garcia is Latin America Open Source Strategist at Intel. She is responsible for creating and maintaining a comprehensive LAR Linux strategy that takes into account all aspects of the Linux environment, including key elements around the community, government, standards, and vendors. She holds major Linux certifications: LPI level 2 and RHCE. After several years ahead Linuxchix Brazil, she was elected co-coordinator of Linuxchix International. She has worked for several years in Linux integration, security and development, and wrote several technical papers about high availability, load balancing and Slackware.

Matthew Garrett has been involved in Ubuntu since 2004 and is a member of the Ubuntu technical board and kernel team. He specialises in mobile Linux and power management technology and has travelled the world widely in order to give presentations on reducing power consumption. He is fully aware of the irony involved in this.

Jerry Gay is a technology consultant, project team member for Rakudo Perl and the Parrot virtual machine, and active participant in the Perl 6 design process.

Steve George is the Director of Corporate Services for Canonical, where he guides the development of Canonical’s services for business. He focuses on the sales, marketing and product development of Canonical’s commercial support offering and specialist engineering services. Previously, he worked in the Internet industry in a range of marketing, product management and technical roles. He’s been involved with Linux since 1997, ever since someone told him it was a new productivity application.

Dave Glowacki

I have been working with Linux and other Open Source technologies since 1995. I enjoyed both the quality of the software, the cost, and the ability to work with the source code to learn and contribute.

In 1997, I joined the Debian GNU/Linux project as a developer. My ties to the community grew over the years; in 2004, I was elected President and Chairman of the Board of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., the nonprofit legal parent organization of Debian.

I also have written several books about Linux and programming. My most recent ones include the Linux Programming Bible and Foundations of Python Network Programming. I am currently working on Real-World Haskell for O’Reilly with two fabulous co-authors. This project is at www.realworldhaskell.org.

Since 2002, I’ve worked in IT for Hustler Turf Equipment, Inc. (Yes, we got the name before Larry Flynt). We make professional and residential lawn mowers, employ about 500 people, and have been growing rapidly for the last six years. We are a heavy Linux shop, running Linux on the majority of our desktops, servers, and even some handhelds. I led the deployment of Asterisk (Open Source PBX) for our phone system, Linux for our ERP system, and Linux plus OpenOffice and Firefox for our desktops. We’re at www.hustlerturf.com.

Coming soon.

Laurence is an engineer at Google in Mountain View, California where he’s worked on several projects including AdWords, AdSense and Google Reader. He holds a BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

Pete Goodall is a ten-year veteran of the technology industry, and has spent the last seven years working in Linux software. For the last four years Pete has worked exclusively with Linux Desktop technologies, and now brings that experience to the mobile Linux space. Pete is based in Canonical’s London office and his primary responsibilities are product definition and market research for the OEM Services group.