Mr. Lars Wirzenius

Programmer, hacker and software developer, he has been programming computers since 1984. He worked on Linux documentation, including the Linux System Administrator's Guide and is the co-moderator of the comp.os.linux.announce newsgroup. He 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 currently lives in Manchester, UK. He attended the University of Helsinki beginning in 1988. While attending the university he became involved with the onset of Linux, where he co-founded the Linux Documentation Project. He also wrote one of their initial books, co-moderating comp.os.linux.announce. From August 1993 to August 1996, he worked in various teaching positions in the Computer Science department, as a teaching assistant and he gave a semester long course on the C language. In addition, from 1996 to the present, he has been 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 which 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 he was a keynote presenter on, "Re-Thinking System and Distro Development". A team of engineers at Codethink have 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.