John Perry Barlow. John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. A co-founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), he was the first to apply the term cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes. He has written for a diversity of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas," is taught in many law schools, and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of websites. In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. John works actively with several consulting groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard, and Global Business Network. In 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services." He writes, speaks, and consults on a broad variety of subjects, particularly digital economy.

Brian Behlendorf.  Brian is an advisor to and executive board member of several technology startups, non-profits, governments, and international organizations.  He is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and Benetech, as well as founder and board member of CollabNet, a collaborative software tools company.  He has served as an advisor to the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services; and as Chief Technology Office at the World Economic Forum.  He was also a founding developer of the Apache Web Server, and served as the first President of the Apache Software Foundation.

Richard A. Belgard.  Rich Belgard has been active in the computer industry for more than 37 years.  Over these years, he designed and managed the development of computer architectures at Burroughs, Data General, Tandem Computers and Rational Software, including hardware, software and microarchitecture. He is co-inventor on 18 patents; sole inventor on 7 patents and currently has other pending patents. Rich is the past Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Microarchitectures, and former Vice-Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Technical Committee on Microprogramming and Microarchitectures. Rich is an IEEE Fellow.

Jon Bentley.  Jon Bentley is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Avaya Labs Research.  His research interests include programming techniques, algorithm design, and the design of software tools and interfaces.  He has written three books on programming and over a hundred articles on a variety of topics, ranging from the theory of algorithms to software engineering.  He received a B.S. from Stanford in 1974 and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1976, then taught Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon for six years.  He joined Bell Labs Research in 1982, and retired in 2001 to join Avaya. He has been a visiting faculty member at West Point and Princeton, and has been a member of teams that have shipped software tools, telephone switches, telephones and web services.  In March 2000 he received the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award for advancing the craft of computer programming.

Matthew Bishop.  Matthew Bishop received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University, where he specialized in computer security, in 1984. He is on the faculty at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis, California, USA. His main research area is the analysis of vulnerabilities in computer systems, including modeling them, building tools to detect vulnerabilities, and ameliorating or eliminating them. Currently, he has research projects involving data sanitization, modeling election processes, and examining metrics for evaluating network attack detection mechanisms; he is also looking at the "insider" problem. He has been active in the area of UNIX security since 1979, and has presented tutorials at SANS, USENIX, and other conferences. He also has done work on electronic voting, and was one of the two principle investigators of the California Top-to-Bottom Review, which performed a technical review of all electronic voting systems certified for use in the State of California, USA. His textbook, Computer Security: Art and Science, was published in December 2002 by Addison-Wesley Professional. He also teaches software engineering, machine architecture, operating systems, programming, and (of course) computer security. Dr. Bishop's affiliations are for identification only.  He signs this brief as an individual.

Frederick Brooks. Brooks is Kenan Professor of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. As Corporate Project Manager for IBM's System/360 (mainframe) computer family hardware and the Operating System/360 software, he in 1964 switched the standard computer byte size from 6 to 8 bits. He was an architect of the Stretch and Harvest supercomputers. He founded UNC's Computer Science Department. He has researched computer architecture, software engineering, the design process, and graphics virtual environments. He wrote The Mythical Man-Month, The Design of Design, and with G.A. Blaauw, Computer Architectture. Honors include the National Medal of Technology, the ACM Turing award, the National Academies of Engineering and Science, and British and Dutch academies.

David L. Dill.  David Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.  Prof. Dill's Ph.D. thesis, "Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical Verification of Speed Independent Circuits" was named as a Distinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988.  He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems, and a Fellow of the ACM in 2005 for contributions to system verification and for leadership in the development of verifiable voting systems. In 2008, he received the first "Computer-Aided Verification" award for fundamental contributions to the theory of real-time systems verification. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Les Earnest.  Les Earnest is a widely-recognized computer scientist, best known for his deep involvement with the Advanced Research Project Agency Network (ARPAnet) startup committee, which led to his invention of the Finger protocol.  He served as a US Navy Aviation Electronics Officer and Digital Computer Project Officer at the Naval Air Development Center, and later joined MIT to help design the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense system.  Later, he innovated numerous early features in the nascent field of word processing, including the first spell-checker.  He was responsible for numerous significant contributions to the field of robotics, creating systems that coupled computer vision with prosthetic and vehicular applications.

Brendan Eich.  Brendan is CTO of Mozilla and widely recognized for his enduring contributions to the Internet revolution. In 1995, Eich invented JavaScript (ECMAScript), the Internet's most widely used programming language. He co-founded the mozilla.org project in 1998, serving as chief architect, and has been a board member of the Mozilla Foundation since its inception in 2003. Brendan helped launch the award-winning Firefox Web browser in November 2004 and Thunderbird e-mail client in December 2004.

Dave Farber. David Farber is Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University holding secondary appointments in the Heinz School of Public Policy and the Engineering Public Policy Group. In 2003, he retired as the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems at the University of Pennsylvania where he held appointments as Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School of Business and as a Faculty Associate of the Annenberg School of Communications. In 2000, he was appointed to be Chief Technologist at the US Federal Communications Commission while on leave from UPenn for one year ending in early June 2001. While at UPenn, he co-directed The Penn Initiative on Markets, Technology and Policy. He was also Director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory - DSL where he managed leading edge research in Ultra High Speed Networking. He is a Visiting Professor of the Center for Global Communications of Japan -- Glocom of the International University of Japan, a Member of the Markle Foundation Taskforce on National Security, and a Member of the Advisory Boards of both the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE and was the recipient of the 1995 ACM Sigcomm Award for life-long contributions to the computer communications field. He was awarded in 1997 the prestigious John Scott Award for Contributions to Humanity.

Jeremiah Flerchinger.  Jeremiah is an acquisitions officer in the United States Air Force. He has spent over nine years in developmental engineering and space operations with the Department of Defense. Jeremiah has been a registered member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a professional international engineering organization, since 1999.

Martin Fowler.  Martin Fowler is an author and educator on software development. He is currently chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, a global system delivery and consulting firm. Mr. Fowler concentrates on the design of enterprise software: what makes a good design and what practices are needed to enhance it. He is the author of seven books on software development, which have over a million copies in print in over a dozen languages. He is the editor of a book series with Addison-Wesley on software design. His website, http://martinfowler.com, is a wide-ranging resource of software development techniques attracting around 150,000 visitors per month.

Allan Gottlieb.  Allan Gottlieb has been a professor of Computer Science within the Courant Institute at New York University for 32 years, teaching both undergraduate and graduate level courses covering programming languages, compilers, operating systems and system architecture.  He is an elected fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and has previously served as Director of the NYU Ultracomputer Project.  Allan is a member of the Computer Society of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and has edited 'Puzzle Corner' for MIT's "Technology Review" for over 45 years.  Allan holds a BS from MIT, and an MA and Ph.D from Brandeis University, all in mathematics.  

David Klausner.  David Klausner has over 45 years of software/hardware development and consulting experience in the computer and software industry.  He has written software for commercial products as an engineer, developer, supervisor, project manager, department manager, middle manager and company executive.  He has worked in forensic investigation and in reverse engineering.  He has been employed in various capacities for various companies, such as Microsoft, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Intel Corporation.  David holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in Mathematics, and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.  He has taught programming, public speaking, has guest lectured at Stanford University, and been an invited speaker by IBM, AT&T, and others.

Kin Lane.  Kin is a computer scientist and API Evangelist working to understand the technology, business and politics of APIs and help share this insight with the world.  He is the author of the book, Business of APIs, and is behind the popular API Evangelist blog.  He has over 20 years of experience as a programmer, database administrator, architect, product developer, manager, and executive in the API space. 

Doug Lea. Doug Lea is a professor of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Oswego. He is an author of numerous books, articles, reports, and standardization efforts on object oriented software development, including work on specification, design and implementation techniques, distributed, concurrent, and parallel object systems, and software reusability.  He has served as chair, organizer, or program committee member for many conferences and workshops in these areas. He is the primary author of several widely used software packages and components.

Paul Menchini. Paul Menchini is a senior programmer and Director of Network Security at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. Previously, he has held technical positions at Hewlett Packard (HP), Intel, General Electric (GE) Microelectronics, CAD Language Systems, Inc. (CLSI) and OrCAD. As a member of the ‘Woods Hole Summer Study on Hardware Description Languages, he contributed to the specifications for VHSIC Hardware Design Language (VHDL).  Subsequently, he edited two revisions of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 1076 Standard VHDL and developed the first commercially successful VHDL compiler. He holds a Masters in Computer Engineering from Stanford University and is the recipient of numerous technical awards, including charter membership in the "IEEE Golden Core."

Martin Odersky.  Martin is a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland.  He is best known as the creator and principal designer of the Scala programming language. Prior to that, he made several contributions to the development of Java. He created the Pizza and Generic Java (GJ) languages, designed the original version of generics for Java, and wrote the javac reference compiler for Java. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Tim Paterson.  Tim began his career designing one of the first 16-bit microcomputer systems at Seattle Computer Products.  He then wrote an operating system for that computer, which was later sold to Microsoft and became widely used as MS-DOS.  He went on to found his own company, Falcon Technology, whose primary products were hard disk systems for personal computers.  He moved on to Microsoft where he was a software engineer for many years, working on such products as QuickBASIC, Visual Basic, VBScript, and Visual J++ (Java).  After his retirement in the late ‘90s he has continued developing software and microcontroller-based hardware projects as a hobby and part-time small business.  He has been granted three US patents on software methods.

Tim Peierls.  Since receiving a BS in Computer Science from Yale in 1983 and an MS in CS from Cornell in 1986, Tim has worked in the software industry continuously, first at Bell Labs (airline crew scheduling), then co-founding the Lightstone Group in 1990 (aircraft scheduling, delivery vehicle routing and scheduling, sold to Descartes Systems Group in 1998) and Seat Yourself in 2002 (online ticketing for school performing arts groups). For the last fifteen years, almost all of his programming work has been in Java.  He has served on the Expert Groups of several Java Specification Requests (166, 201, 330, 334) and on the SE/EE Executive Committee of the Java Community Process; he co-authored a book, Java Concurrency in Practice; and he contributed code, support, and advice to various open source projects, including Restlet, Hazelcast, and JClouds.

Simon Phipps.  Simon is the President of the Open Source Initiative, the global steward of the Open Source Definition. OSI serves to advocate for, educate about and build bridges within the open source community. A Fellow of the British Computer Society, his career has included early engagement in establishing Java, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and weblogs as computer industry technologies as well as contributions to open standards in a variety of fields. As chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems he supervised the open source relicensing of Solaris Unix, Java and many other software systems. He is currently founder and CEO of Meshed Insights Ltd, a UK firm offering management services related to open source and digital rights.

Bill Pugh.  Bill invented Skip Lists, a randomized data structure that is widely taught in undergraduate data structure courses.  He has also made research contributions in techniques for analyzing and transforming scientific codes for execution on supercomputers, and in a number of issues related to the Java programming language, including the development of Java Specification Request (JSR) 133 - Java Memory Model and Thread Specification Revision. Current research projects include FindBugs, a widely used static analysis tool for Java, and Marmoset, an innovative framework for improving the learning and feedback cycle for student programming projects.

Larry Roberts.  Dr. Roberts most recently was Founder, Chairman and CEO of Anagran Inc. Anagran is currently manufacturing flow rate management network equipment, the first major improvement in packet network technology in the 40 years since Dr. Roberts designed and managed the first packet network, the ARPANET (now the Internet). At that time, in 1967, Dr. Roberts joined ARPA taking on the task of designing, funding, and managing a radically new communications network concept (packet switching) to interconnect computers worldwide. The first for nodes of the ARPANET were installed in 1969 and by 1973 when Dr. Roberts left ARPA to become CEO of Telenet (now part of Sprint), the concept of packet switching had been well proven to the world. Dr. Roberts has BS, MS, and Ph.D. Degrees from MIT and has received numerous awards for his work, including the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the L.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications, in 1992 the W. Wallace McDowell Award, in 1998 the ACM SIGCOMM Award, in 2000 the IEEE Internet Award, in 2001 the National Academy of Engineering Draper Award, in 2002 the Principe de Asturias Award, and in 2005 the NEC Computer and Communication Award. 

Bruce Schneier.  Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist.  He is the author of 12 books -- including his latest best-seller Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive -- as well as hundreds of articles and essays, and many more academic papers.  His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram," and his blog "Schneier on Security," are read by over 250,000 people.  He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, served on several government technical committees, and is regularly quoted in the press.  Schneier is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT.

Curtis Schroeder.  Curtis is a U.S. citizen currently working for a European company, Antycip Simulation, and based in the UK.  He is also serving as the Drafting Group Editor for the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) Product Development Group for the Common Image Generator Interface (CIGI) standard.  The success of SISO international standards depends upon implementation of said copyrighted standards by numerous simulation vendors and end-users, including NATO.  Previously, Curtis worked for Lockheed Martin for sixteen years, where he utilized a number of open standards in projects he was involved in.  He earned B.S. and M.S. Computer Science degrees at the Missouri University of Science & Technology.

Dave Snigier.  Dave Snigier is a futurist who uses technology to solve human problems. He has lead several successful projects as part of the Emerging Technologies group at UMass including a system-wide paperless initiative. He now spends his days as an architect responsible for designing how different systems will communicate with each other; often including the use of APIs as a significant component.

Bjarne Stroustrup.  Bjarne Stroustrup is Professor holding the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University.  He is the inventor of the widely-used C++ programming language, and wrote the standard textbook on the language and its implementation, The C++ Programming Language.  He was the first head of AT&T Lab's Programming Research department, and is a fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE.  He also was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.  He holds a masters degree in mathematics and computer science from Aarhus University, in Denmark, and a Ph.D in computer science from University of Cambridge.

Paul Sutter.  Paul is the co-founder at Quantcast, backed by Founders Fund, Polaris, and Cisco, as well as the founder at Orbital Data, backed by Redpoint and Sevin-Rosen, and acquired by Citrix in 2006.  He was the VP of Engineering at Altavista, and founded Transium, acquired by Altavista in 2000.

Michael Tiemann.  Michael Tiemann is a true open source software pioneer. He made his first major open source contribution more than two decades ago by writing the GNU C++ compiler, the first native-code C++ compiler and debugger. His early work led to the creation of leading open source technologies and the first open source business model.  Tiemann co-founded Cygnus Solutions, the first company to provide commercial support for open source software, and contributed in a number of roles from President to hacker, helping lead the company from fledgling start-up to an admired open source leader. Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, where he previously served as Chief Technical Officer (CTO).  Tiemann earned a BS CSE degree from the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania, and later did research at INRIA and Stanford University.  Tiemann retired as President of the Board at the Open Source Initiative in 2012, and was a founding Board member of both the Eclipse Foundation and the Embedded Linux Consortium.  He also served on the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board. 

Andrew Tridgell.  Dr. Andrew Tridgell is a computer scientist and free software developer in Canberra, Australia. Best known for his contributions to the development of the award winning Samba suite of networking software that enables interoperability with Microsoft networking services, he has been actively developing in the area of interoperability for more than 20 years.

Josh Triplett.  Josh Triplett is a Free and Open Source Software developer, contributing to projects such as the Linux kernel, Debian, ChromeOS, Git, Sparse, and the X Window System.  Josh earned a Ph.D. at Portland State University, constructing concurrent data structures and synchronization techniques for highly parallel systems.  Josh enjoys using software for unconventional purposes, such as running Python in the GRUB2 bootloader to test BIOS, and using Git as a database.  In his "free time", Josh does as much of his hacking as possible in Haskell.  

Phillip Wadler.  Philip Wadler is Professor of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.  He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, past chair of ACM SIGPLAN, and past holder of a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship. Previously, he worked or studied at Stanford, Xerox Parc, Carnegie Mellon University, Oxford, Chalmers, Glasgow, Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and visited as a guest professor in Copenhagen, Sydney, and Paris. He has an h-index of 61, with more than 18,000 citations to his work according to Google Scholar. He is a winner of the POPL Most Influential Paper Award, has contributed to the designs of Haskell, Java, and XQuery, and is a co-author of Introduction to Functional Programming (Prentice Hall, 1988), XQuery from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2004) and Generics and Collections in Java (O'Reilly, 2006). He has delivered invited talks in locations ranging from Aizu to Zurich.