Marcel Gagné, Author of "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" and Linux Journal Columnist

Marcel Gagné (Canada's Linux Guru), is probably best known as the award-winning author of the Linux Journal 'Cooking with Linux' series, for which he received the Readers' Choice award for favorite column four years in a row. His fourth, and more recent book, the second edition of his immensely successful "Moving to Linux: Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!' is available in stores now. One of the best known voices of the Linux and open source world, he has written numerous articles on Linux and open source projects for various publications including Linux Journal, InformIT, Unix Review, SysAdmin magazine, and several others. He also appears regularly on radio, at industry shows, user groups, universities, and as the Linux guy on Tech TV's "Call for Help". He has written about, installed, and taught many open source applications including the Linux desktop environment itself, as well as the popular OpenOffice.org office suite. A long-time systems and network administrator, Marcel is a published science fiction author and editor, a pilot, an avid science and astronomy buff, and a former top 40 disc jockey. He also folds a mean Origami T-Rex.

Nat Friedman, Vice President, Linux Desktop, Novell

Nat Friedman is Vice President of Linux Desktop Engineering at Novell, in charge of the vision and implementation of Novell's desktop products. Both a hacker and an entrepreneur, Nat cofounded Ximian in 1999, which was later acquired by Novell. Nat started the Beagle, Dashboard, Hula, and Better Desktop projects and today is responsible for overseeing the development of Evolution, F-Spot, Banshee, and many other projects. Nat served as chairman of the GNOME Foundation for two years.

Phil Schwan

Phil has been developing software as a hobby or career for as long as he can remember. Most recently, he spent four years building the company behind the open source Lustre file system, a product that solves real problems for the world's largest Linux supercomputers. A few months of speaking, consulting, and piloting will pass for "vacation" before he returns to startup mode next year.

Marcus Bornfreund, B.A., LL.B. (University of Western Ontario), LL.M. in Law & Technology (University of Ottawa), Creative Commons, Canada

Marcus Bornfreund is a Co-Director of Creative Commons Canada, a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada and the founder of LawShare.ca: a collaborative online platform for legal professionals. Marcus has recently returned to his native Toronto, where his law practice focuses on helping individuals and small companies understand and manage their intellectual property.

Chris Blizzard, One Laptop Per Child Project

Chris has been hanging around the free software community since some time in the mid-90s. In that time he's touched GNOME, maintained bits of the Mozilla backend and cared far too much about the success of free software on desktops. He's been happily working at Red Hat, Inc for the last 7 years and most recently has been on assignment working on the One Laptop per Child project. The project aims to bring laptops to millions of children throughout the developing world in order to give them the tools to learn and grow. He also sits on the board of directors of the Mozilla Corporation.

Ren Bucholz, Policy Coordinator, Americas, Electronic Frontier Foundation

My name is Ren Bucholz and I currently live in Toronto, Ontario. By day, I work on international policy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My primary focus is on Canada and Europe, but I occasionally find myself in other places as well. I've been on staff at EFF since 2002, and it's an amazingly exciting, fun place to work.

In a former life I managed a noncommercial radio station and worked for one of the first Internet broadcasters. I also majored in journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I graduated with honors. I'm currently working on an MA part-time in Communications & Culture at York University. That happens to be where Laura, my lovely wife, is a professor.

Steve Hayman, Apple

Steve is a National Consulting Engineer with Apple's US Education Team, based - oddly enough - in Toronto, specializing in Apple's developer tools and UNIX core. Prior to Apple, Steve worked with that other Steve at NeXT Computer, where he first fell in love with the combination of powerful object-oriented development tools and a great Unix core; before that he was Network Manager at Indiana University; before that he picked up an M.Math at Waterloo, before that he had a summer job painting construction equipment. Steve is delighted that Apple's blend of Unix and object orientation is reaching many more users than NeXT's tools ever did, and although he enjoys a good "vi vs. emacs" argument as much as any Unix geek, he's even more intrigued with what you can do with strong OO tools and libraries. As a result Steve has built and thrown away dozens of different web browsers based on Apple's WebKit. In his spare time he directs Argonotes, the Toronto Argonauts Band, the finest band in the Canadian Football League.

James Walker

James is a free software developer with an insatiable appetite for new, collaborative and/or disruptive internet technologies. He most recently co-founded Bryght (http://www.bryght.com/), a Vancouver- based technology company focused on providing hosting, services and expertise around Drupal, a popular open-source content management system. He is also heavily involved in Jabber and Identity 2.0 technologies.

Neil Deakin, Mozilla Corporation

Neil Deakin has been involved in the Mozilla world since 1999, when he created the XUL tutorial, which describes the user interface technology used by Mozilla products. Deakin has also worked for MozDev Group developing Mozilla-based solutions for clients. He currently works at the Mozilla Corporation improving the user interface platform for Firefox and other Mozilla applications.

Benjamin Smedberg, XULRunner Lead Developer, Mozilla Corporation

Benjamin Smedberg works for the Mozilla Corporation as the coordinator and lead developer of the Mozilla XULRunner project. He is the module owner of Mozilla's toolkit, embedding, and build system modules. In a previous life, Smedberg was a professional choir director and organist.

Eric Shepherd, Developer Documentation Lead, Mozilla Corporation

Eric Shepherd is a writer and programmer that likes both so much he found himself doing technical writing for a living. He's worked on both closed and open documentation efforts, and likes open much better, thank you.

Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice.org

Louis Suarez-Potts is the Community Manager and community lead of OpenOffice.org, a role he has held more or less since the project's inception. He speaks throughout the world on OpenOffice.org and open source; his emphasis is on the social logic of free software. Suarez-Potts holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Senior Community Development Manager at CollabNet.

Brian Down, Chief Technologist, Sun Canada

In his previous role as Chief Technologist for Enterprise Migration, with the Global Data Center Practice, Brian was successful in creating an Enterprise Migration methodology that was adopted globally. Through the development and delivery of training and collateral in addition to supporting strategic sales opportunities, Brian enabled many countries to successfully migrate customers to Sun technology.

Before joining Sun in 1998, Brian held a number of diverse positions such as a Senior Developer for the computer security company Secure Computing, an advanced imaging specialist for IMAX Corporation and as a research associate for the Dept. of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Brian completed a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, is a published author (Migrating to the Solaris Operating System), and is a recognized global expert in Solaris adoption.

Jon Phillips, Creative Commons, Open Clip Art Library, Inkscape

Jon Phillips (www.rejon.org) is an open source developer, artist, writer, educator, lecturer, and curator with 13+ years of experience creating communities and working within computing culture. His involvements with mixing culture and software development have been shown internationally at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (2006), Sun Yat-Sen University (2006), desktop Developers Conference (2005), SFMoMA (2004), University of Tokyo (2004), Korea's KAIST (2004), UCLA Hammer Museum, UC-Berkeley's 040404 Conference (2004), USC Aim Festival IV (2003), and the ICA London (2002). He is a core Open Source developer advocate and developer on Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org), a scalable vector graphics editor and on the Open Clip Art Library (http://openclipart.org), and is writing/producing a book, "CVS: Concurrency, Versioning and Systems." Currently, he is visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute (www.sfai.edu) in the Design +Technology department and is an Open Source developer for the Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org).

Peter Moogk, Rational Web Services Development, IBM Canada Ltd.

Peter has worked on various software development projects at IBM for the last 17 years. Some of the projects he has worked on are: Ada Compiler development, PCMCIA device driver development, Mwave DSP tools development, and Object Builder development. For the last three years Peter has worked on the Web Services component of IBM's Websphere Studio products. He has also implemented the Environment Command Framework and the Dynamic Wizard Framework.

George Belotsky, Open Light Software Inc.

George Belotsky is a software architect who has done extensive work on high performance Internet servers as well as hard real time and embedded systems. His technology interests include C++, Python and Linux. George Belotsky has written several articles for O'Reilly Network. His series on C++ memory management made the best of 2003 list on O'Reilly ONLamp. He is also the author of the Flightdeck-UI Open Source project, which he presented at PyCon 2003 in Washington, DC.

Jeffery Liu, Software Developer, IBM Rational Software

Jeffrey is a software developer at the IBM Toronto Lab. He is responsible for the development of the Rational Portfolio Manager. Jeffrey joined IBM in 2001 after graduating with distinction from the University of British Columbia with a B.A.Sc in Computer Engineering, Commerce minor.

Lawrence Mandel, Software Developer, IBM Rational Software

Lawrence Mandel, a software developer at the IBM Toronto Laboratory, is a committer and the documentation lead for the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) and is leading the Apache Woden project, which is creating a reference implementation of WSDL 2.0. Lawrence is also actively working on a new enterprise portfolio management product at IBM Rational and is authoring a book about Java Web Application Development with Eclipse with Naci Dai and Arthur Ryman.

Hamton Catlin, Unspace Interactive Inc.

Hampton Catlin is officially too old to be described as a "boy genius" but his energy makes it hard to get around the idea.

Unspace’s newest team member, Hampton works boundlessly to develop exciting contributions to his clients’ projects. Widely appreciated as both passionate and ultracreative, Hampton has received grants from Furman University and NASA for his research in the areas of large-scale data dispersal methods. Hampton considers his work an obsession and his drive for excellence something that makes him a "troublemaker", but the truth is his approach to programming is so highly evolved that the kind of trouble he makes, everybody wants.

His most recent trick was the creation of the Hash Conditional method in ActiveRecord for Ruby on Rails, but wise eyes will stay locked on his future endeavours at Unspace.

Pete Forde, Unspace Interactive Inc.

Pete Forde slaved away in the shadows of Microsoft development for a decade until Ruby on Rails clicked its heels three times, forcing Pete to help found Unspace. Demanding, innovative, and not a little eccentric, Pete is the sort of person whom interesting projects tend to follow around. Pete’s concern for quality is as much a personal drive as it is a professional one, and informs his approaches to programming and brainstorming with unwavering strength. Pete has deftly handled clients from retail entities like Chapters to energy brokerages and government institutions — all while managing to drum in a rock band in his "spare" time. Dedicated to the idea of constructive community, Pete is the monthly host of Toronto Rails Pub Nite, and couldn’t be happier to go to work every day with the most intelligent people he’s ever met.

Ryan McMinn, Unspace Interactive Inc.

Mobility-minded Ryan McMinn runs the business side of Unspace, and hasn’t owned a desktop computer since 1999. As a partner in M7 Database Services, Ryan refined his innate practicality and belief in unrestricted, cooperative working styles into the finely tuned machine he is today as a founding partner at Unspace. From clients in the entertainment industry to large financial institutions to the federal government, Ryan works hard to make sure the client not only feels, but is involved in every step of developing their product. A believer that good business comes from good client relationships, Ryan insists on working with clients within a process to ensure understanding on even the most micro levels and prevent problems before they even have a chance to occur. Ryan hopes to see Unspace continue as a voice in the community for the ideas, methodologies and ethics that guide Unspace in its success and inspire its clients. He would work at Unspace even if it were for free, but he’s far too pragmatic for that.

Nathan Yergler, Senior Software Engineer, Creative Commons

Nathan R. Yergler is a Senior Software Engineer at Creative Commons. He leads the ccPublisher project and is responsible for the web services and license engine infrastructure. Before joining Creative Commons Nathan served on the Canterbury School faculty where he developed the Python programming curriculum and web-based tools for improving teacher to student communication. Nathan holds a BS in Computer Science from Purdue University and is a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Dafydd Hughes is a musician/educator in Toronto. He performs professionally as a keyboardist and teaches Music Technologies at Sheridan College. He uses Pure Data and other open source tools to create music and sound art. Presentation Summary: Pure Data (PD) is an open source real-time programming environment which enables artists to create custom software for sound, video and kinetic art. As a dataflow language, in which objects are connected graphically to control the flow of information, PD is easier to use than code-based languages and more flexible than higher-level solutions like sequencers, software synthesizers and VJ programs. This makes PD ideal for cross-disciplinary applications such as live audio-visual performance, interactive multimedia and real-time human-computer collaboration. This presentation will introduce participants to PD as a tool for sound, video and interaction between computers and the physical world.

Julian Egelstaff, Senior Business Analyst/Lead Developer, Freeform Solutions

Since 2000, I have been the project leader and a programmer on several portal website projects for clients in the not-for-profit sector. We started out using PHP 3 and are now eyeing features of PHP 5 for our next generation implementations.

The systems we have developed are used by thousands of people across Canada, and the custom built applications within them help our client organizations carry out their core business processes -- they're not just forums and file download archives.

Previously, I had several years experience at Corel and Cognos, two of Canada's largest software companies.

G. Matthew Rice, VP of Product Development, Linux Professional Institute

G. Matthew Rice is the current VP of Product Development for the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). Mr. Rice is also co-founded a Linux and OSS focused consulting and training company called Starnix in 1998, where he makes regular use of his LPI certification.

Meron Hrycusko, Senior Web Developer - York University, Faculty of Arts

Meron Hrycusko is a Senior Web Developer for the Faculty of Arts at York University. Prior to this position, he was an e-learning consultant specializing in Learning Management Systems for various corporations throughout North America including Hewlett Packard and Wachovia Bank.

Chris Tyler, Professor, School of Computer Studies - Seneca College

Chris Tyler is a professor in the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College, where he teaches programming and Linux system administration. He has been a computer consultant since 1986 and specializes in open source software and database-backed web applications. Chris is the author of "Fedora Linux: A Complete Guide to Red Hat's Community Distro" (O'Reilly) and is completing a book on the X Window System.

David Humphrey, Professor, School of Computer Studies - Seneca College

David Humphrey is a professor in the School of Computer Studies at Seneca College. He teaches programming and specializes in object-oriented languages, with a focus on C# and the .NET Framework. He is a founding member of the Centre for the Development of Open Technology (CDOT) at Seneca College. David received his M.A. from the University of Toronto in English Literature, and when he isn't reading literary theory he writes Open Source software.

Nilesh Mistry, Academic Computer Services - Seneca College

Nilesh Mistry is a Windows/Unix administrator at Seneca College with over 9 years experience in providing technical support for users on stand alone servers and clusters, specializing in Oracle, mpiBLAST, Windows and LINUX. He has also worked with open source community on Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR), porting the OSCAR Trunk to SuSE as well as developing applications such as server administration and monitoring software.

Kevin Pitts, eLearning Faculty Advisor - Seneca College

Kevin is a Faculty member and eLearning Faculty Advisor in the Faculty of Information Arts and Technology’s eLearning Centre at Seneca College. He believes in the effective use of technology to enhance the teaching and learning process and has been involved in implementing technology into everyday teaching and learning at Seneca, whether in class, online, or a mixture of both.

Mike Martin, Professor, School of Computer Studies - Seneca College

Mike Martin is a professor at Seneca College in the CNS/CTY program. He teaches Linux, the Apache server, and network security. Mike has just completed his M. Sc. in Information Technology with the University of Liverpool, in the U.K. He has also studied Geology at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and programming in the CPA program at Seneca.

Mohsen Rezayatmand, Academic Computer Services - Seneca College

Mohsen Rezayatmand is a senior Unix administrator at Seneca College with over 10 years experience in providing senior technical support for users on stand alone servers and clusters, specializing in AIX, IRIX, LINUX, and Windows platforms. He has also worked with the open source community on Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR), porting the OSCAR Trunk to SuSE as well as developing applications such as server administration and monitoring software.

James Humphreys, eLearning Faculty Advisor - Seneca College

James is a faculty member and instructional designer in the eLearning Centre within the Faculty of Applied Arts and Health Sciences at Seneca College. His role is to assist faculty with various educational technologies to enhance the teaching and learning process... this involves helping faculty use Seneca's course management system effectively, developing learning objects, exploring new technologies, and developing mixed-mode or fully online courses.

John Selmys, Professor - Seneca College

John joined Seneca College as a full-time teacher in 1983 and initially taught programming on a DEC VAX 11/780. He moved to programming with C on IBM PCs and to UNIX with a product named Coherent. In 1990 John migrated his courses to an IBM RS/6000 (Seneca's first Phobos). John learned C++, his first object-oriented language and followed that with Smalltalk and then Java. In 1993 John discovered Linux (Slackware, Red Hat and now SuSE). In 1998 John designed and built Seneca's first Linux lab and in 1999 he developed the ISA (Internet Systems Administration) Linux post-diploma program which he coordinates to this day. John is the originator of Seneca's Open Source Symposium and is currently in the third year of a four year project established to study Open Source Software in Ontario Secondary Schools. John enjoys teaching UNIX programming and Linux administration, mentoring students in our Linux club and organizing Linux Install Festivals. John has been Windows-free since 1996.