As director of engineering and Special Projects at the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation, Chris Hofmann has spearheaded the research and development work of thousands of open source contributors around the world.

A Netscape employee before joining Mozilla full-time, Chris contributed to every Netscape and Mozilla browser release since 1996.

The first employee at the Mozilla Foundation in August 2003, Chris led a small but devoted team of top engineers to establish the Mozilla Foundation as an independent and self-sustaining organization.

In 2004, Chris managed and executed the first worldwide release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0, which launched that November. Firefox 1.0 helped to fulfill the Mozilla Foundation’s goal of supporting open Web standards and provide innovation and choice for Internet client software and set Firefox on a path to remarkable marketshare growth over the last several years.

Chris now develops partnerships with companies that test, develop and distribute Mozilla technology in a variety of ways. He also helps to build out the Mozilla communities around the world that are involved with localization of Firefox in to over 40 languages, and provide support to Firefox users. He engages with security researchers to help improve browser security, and works on a variety of mobile initiatives using the Mozilla technology.

Rik works as a senior software engineer for Red Hat.

He is one of the most emblematic figures in the movement of defense the use of free software.

As president and executive director of Linux International, has travelled around the world, promoting the benefits of using Linux as an operating system.
Hall obtained a degree in commerce and engineering at Drexel University in 1973 and a diploma in computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1977. Jon Hall likes to call himself “maddog”, nickname given by his students at Hatford State Technical College; in fact, in his presentations and conferences, he uses this term to introduce himself.

During his thirty year career, Hall has worked for many companies (Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI) as programmer, system designer, sysadmin, director of product, marketing technical director, writer and consultant to governments around the world, but according to him, what he likes most is to teach. In the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2006, Hall was awarded for his service to the open source community.

He has worked in Linux and has been involved in many free software projects for more than ten years. He worked in the distribution OpenLinux for the German subsidiary of Caldera and long after he was hired by large companies in the ICT area as SGI and Dell. Since 2006, works on Linux / Cell for IBM.

Christoph also participated in the 7th Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in the city of Córdoba, where he gave a talk about “Kernel Hacking”

Dag Wieers

Dag discovered Linux around 1995 and has never used anything else since (except when forced physically, emotionally or financially). Since 1997 he packaged software for Red Hat Linux, RHEL/CentOS and Fedora. Since 2005 he is part of the CentOS project.Dag is a Linux consultant by trade, a sysadmin by vocation and an Open Source ambassador by conviction. During his professional life until now, he gained experience in automating system administration tasks, analysing system problems and designing future-scalable solutions, as well as operating a small company.

As a spare-time developer he has written or contributed to dstat, proxytunnel, mrepo,dconf, unoconv, sarah and many Open Source utilities.

Mario is a site reliability engineer, responsible for maintaining most of Google’s cluster and storage fabric, and qualifying next generation storage systems. Prior to joining Google, he was a unix systems administrator at Uruguayan Bank. Earlier, Mario was part of the team that founded FSFLA (Free Software Foundation Latin America) and was one of the organization’s original board members. He also helped found the UYLUG (Uruguayan Linux User Group) in 1997.

Raymond is a Python Core Developer and is responsible of introducing
generator expressions, creating the itertools and collections modules,
optimizing the language, and designing several builtin functions,
including any(), all(), set(), frozenset(), sorted(), reversed() and
enumerate().

He’s active in the Python developers and general mailing lists. He’s a
Python Software Foundation member, and one of its Directors since
February of this year. He’s also author of more than thirty recipes of
the ASPN Python Cookbook, and maintains several third party tools.