The Hackontest jury

Jeremy Allison, Samba

Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License. Other contributions include the early versions of the pwdump password cracking utility.

Jono Bacon, Ubuntu

Jono Bacon is a writer and software developer based in the United Kingdom. Bacon started his work with the Linux community when he created the UK Linux website, Linux UK. When he left this project he moved on to join the KDE team, where he created the KDE::Enterprise website and KDE Usability Study. Until September 1, 2006, Bacon worked for OpenAdvantage, funded by Advantage West Midlands, a Regional Development Agency. As of September 4, 2006, he works for Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager.

Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Subversion

Brian W. Fitzpatrick is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and currently works for Google. He has been involved with Subversion in one way or another since its inception in early 2000. He is also the author of Version Control with Subversion. Originally from New Orleans, Brian moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University where he received a degree in Latin and Greek.

Martin F. Krafft, Debian

Martin F. Krafft ("madduck") is a dedicated Debian developer who focuses on integration tasks and process improvement, and maintains a few packages, such as mdadm, hibernate, and logcheck. He is the author of the book The Debian System. Martin currently researches how new methods might be deployed in global volunteer projects to increase their efficiency. He spear-heads a cross-distro packaging collaboration effort and hacks on an improved (cross-distro) network configuration management system, if there is time left in the day.

Alexander Limi, Plone

Alexander Limi is one of Plone's original founders, and combines the kind of good looks, intelligence, sensitivity, and raw animal magnetism that only come from writing his own biography. He works at Google in Mountain View, California. Limi is the all-hands person in the Plone project, and is also responsible for keeping the user experience and visual layout consistent and easy to use — as well as herding the cats known as the Plone community.

Federico Mena-Quintero, GNOME

Federico Mena-Quintero is a Mexican computer programmer. He wrote the GNOME Canvas while working at Red Hat. He also maintained GIMP for a time, and was one of the first hires at Ximian, now owned by Novell, where he still works. Along with Miguel de Icaza, Federico founded the GNOME project. He attended Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), where he met Icaza, to study computer science; he left there to work at Red Hat in the US. He's lived most of his life in Mexico City, but currently lives in Xalapa, Veracruz, with his wife, Oralia.

Bram Moolenaar, vim

Bram Moolenaar is widely known as the author of Vim, the text editor. He moved from electrical engineering to software, but still knows how to use a soldering iron. After making embedded software for photo copying machines and starting the A-A-P project, Bram now works for Google in Switzerland.

Bruce Perens, OSI founder

Bruce Perens is a leader in the Free Software and Open Source community. He is creator of the Open Source Definition, the manifesto of the Open Source movement in Software. In 2005, he represented Open Source at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society, at the invitation of the United Nations Development Program. He's founder or co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, The Linux Standard Base, Software in the Public Interest, and No-Code International. Perens released his first Free Software program, /Electric Fence,/ in 1987. He is creator of Busybox, which has spawned its own development community and is part of many consumer devices. He is presently CEO of Kiloboot.

Lukas K. Smith, PHP

Lukas Smith is a long time contributor to the PHP project. Ranging from developing various packages for the PEAR subproject as well as taking a leading role in the organization of PEAR itself, to lately focusing more on improving various aspects in the organization of the PHP project itself. He also makes regular appearances at conferences around the globe, where he mostly focuses on database topics. He is employed as a software developer at LIIP in Zurich Switzerland, but still makes regular trips to his home town Berlin and various Ultimate Frisbee tournaments all over the world.

Harald Welte, gpl-violations.org

Harald Welte is a programmer resident in Berlin, Germany. Within the free software community, Welte is well known as a hacker of the Linux kernel and for his activities in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL), the license that governs the use of much of free software. Welte is also involved in a number of free software projects, such as OpenMoko, (a Linux version for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones) and the netfilter/iptables project (the core firewall mechanism in Linux-based firewall computers and routing devices). He is an active member of the Chaos Computer Club.