Karim Yaghmour is the founder and president of Opersys, a company providing expertise and courses on the use of open source and free software in embedded systems, and Kryptiva, a a provider of email security services. Being himself an active member of the open source and free software community, Karim has firmly established Opersys's services around the core values of knowledge sharing and technical quality promoted by this community. As part of his community involvement, Karim is the maintainer of the Linux Trace Toolkit and the author of a series of white-papers that led to the implementation of the Adeos nanokernel, which allows multiple operating systems to exist side-by-side.

Karim's quest for understanding how things work started at a veryyoung age when he took it upon himself to break open all the radiosand cassette players he could lay his hands on in order to "fix"them. Very early, he developed a keen interest in operating systeminternals and embedded systems. He now holds a B.Eng. and anM.A.Sc. from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. While everyonewas hacking away at Linux, Karim even took a detour to write his owndistributed micro-kernel in order to get to the bottom of operatingsystem design and implementation. When not working on software, Karimindulges in his passion for history, philosophy, sociology, andhumanities in general. He's especially addicted to essays and novelsby Umberto Eco and Gerald Messadie.

Jonathan Masters works on the Linux kernel for Red Hat.

Gilad Ben-Yossef is the cofounder and CTO of Codefidence TD. and has been assisting OEMs make use of free and open source software in commercial products and services since 1998. He is also cofounder of Hamakor, an NPO devoted to the promotion of FOSS in Israel, and a founding organizer of "August Penguin," an Israeli community FOSS conference.

Gilad is a member of the Israeli chapter of Mensa, the Israeli Information Technology Association and the Israeli chapter of the Internet Society. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Tel-Aviv Jaffa Academic College.

When not trying to make FOSS software do something the authors never intended, Gilad likes to SCUBA dive, read science fiction and spend time with his wife Limor and his and two adorable girls, Almog and Yael.

Philippe Gerum is the founder and maintainer of the Adeos and Xenomai projects.