Lars Wirzenius

Co-founder of the Linux Documentation Project, Wirzenius has been programming computers since 1984. He worked on Linux documentation, including the Linux System Administrator's Guide, and was the co-moderator of the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup. Wirzenius has said, "I read the GNU Manifesto in 1986, but didn't really become interested in software freedom until 1988, when I got into university and got access to the Internet." Originally from Helsinki, Finland, he later lived in Manchester, UK.

He attended the University of Helsinki beginning in 1988. While attending the university, Wirzenius became involved with the onset of Linux, where he co-founded the Linux Documentation Project. He also wrote one of their initial books and co-moderated comp.os.linux.announce. From August 1993 to August 1996, he worked in various teaching positions in the Computer Science department, serving as a teaching assistant and giving a semester-long course on the C language.

From 1996 onward, Wirzenius has served as a developer on the Debian project, a free operating system (OS) for computers. From January 1997 to June 1999, he worked at Helsinki University of Technology as a programmer and systems administrator on a research team that developed the in-memory database engine and functional programming language, HiBase.

From September 2011 to September 2014, he worked as Senior Software Developer at Codethink, Limited. In 2012, Wirzenius was a keynote presenter on "Re-Thinking System and Distro Development." A team of engineers at Codethink put together a concrete realization of these concepts, combined with real-life experience of existing embedded and distro build systems, making the Baserock embedded build system ready for real-world use.