Mr. Patrick Volkerding

The author, founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution, he is Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man". He has also contributed to the SVGA library and various other projects. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System, Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux, and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution. It makes as few modifications as possible to software packages from upstream and tries not to anticipate use cases or preclude user decisions. In contrast to most modern Linux distributions, Slackware provides no graphical installation procedure and no automatic dependency resolution of software packages. It uses plain text files and only a small set of shell scripts for configuration and administration. Without further modification it boots into a command-line interface environment. Because of its many conservative and simplistic features, Slackware is considered to be most suitable for advanced and technically inclined Linux users. Slackware is available for the IA-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a port to the ARM architecture. While Slackware is mostly free and open source software, it does not have a formal bug tracking facility or public code repository, with releases periodically announced by him. There is no formal membership procedure for developers and he is the primary contributor to releases. For a short while, Chris Lumens, David Cantrell and Logan Johnson assisted with his work on Slackware, but for the last several years he has managed Slackware with the help of many volunteers and testers. Born in Virginia where his father was stationed as a Navy dentist, when he was very young the family moved to North Dakota. As a young boy he was interested in science, the space race, and hoped to be a scientist one day. When he was 7 or 8 years old his class took a field trip to North Dakota State University to see the computer department, and it was there that he got his first taste of UNIX and realized he wanted to work with computers. He currently resides in Moorhead, Minnesota, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993. In 2014, he received the O'Reilly Open Source Award. He is the author or co-author of publications on Linux including: with Kevin Reichard, ?Linux System Commands?, IDG Books/M&T Books, 2000, ISBN 0-7645-4669-4; with Kevin Reichard and Eric Foster-Johnson, ?Instalaci?n y configuraci?n de Linux?, Temas profesionales. Madrid: Anaya Multimedia, 1999 ISBN 84-415-0816-X; with Kevin Reichard, and Eric Foster-Johnson, , ?LINUX Configuration and Installation?, M&T Books, 1998, ISBN 0-7645-7005-6; and with Kevin Reichard, ?Linux in Plain English?, MIS:Press, 1997, ISBN 1-55828-542-3.