Below you'll find the names and short descriptions of people who have made significant contributions to furthering the use of Linux. Some are developers but there are others from many other professions.

A
Anvin, H. Peter	Nationality: Swedish Developer of the SYSLINUX boot loader
B
Becker, Donald	Nationality: USA Created most of the ethernet drivers for the Linux kernel.
C
Cox, Alan	Nationality: British (Wales) One of the earliest kernel contributors. Maintainer of the 2.2 branch.
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de Icaza, Miquel	Nationality: Mexican Founder of the GNOME desktop environment project. Co-founder of Ximian (bought by Novell in 2003). Developer of MONO project
Gaäl Duval	Nationality: French Creator of the Mandrake Linux distribution. Co-founder of MandrakeSoft (now Mandriva).
E
Ewing, Larry	Nationality: USA Creator of Tux, the Linux penguin.
Ewing, Mark	Nationality: USA Creator of the Red Hat Linux distribution and co-founder of Red Hat Inc.
F
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Gagné, Marcel	Nationality: Canadian Author of popular 'Moving to Linux' series of books as well as several other titles. Contributor to publications such as Linux Journal.
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Hall, Jon 'maddog'	Nationality: USA Executive Director of Linux International
I
J
Jones, Pamela	Nationality: USA Maintainer of the Groklaw website, which provides comprehensive legal information on the SCO vs IBM case and other related cases.
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L
Lerdorf, Rasmus	Nationality: Danish Creator of the PHP programming language
M
McLagan, Michael	Nationality: Canadian Founder of Linux Online (www.linux.org) and a kernel contributor.
Miller, Robin 'roblimo'	Nationality: USA Editor in chief for OSTG, the parent company of websites Slashdot, Linux.com, Newsforge and others. Writer for these publications and author of 'Point and Click Linux'.
Moglen, Eben	Nationality: USA Professor of Law at Columbia University, NY, USA. General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation
Morton, Andrew	Nationality: USA Kernel developer and maintainer of the 2.6 branch.
Murdock, Ian	Nationality: USA Founder of the Debian GNU/Linux project and a founding director of Linux International
N
O
P
Perens, Bruce	Nationality: USA Along with Eric S. Raymond, coined the term "Open Source". Former Debian/GNU Linux project leader. Maintainer of the UserLinux distribution. Editor of Prentice-Hall's Bruce Perens' Open Source Series of books.
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Raymond, Eric S.	Nationality: USA Along with Bruce Perens, coined the term "Open Source". Developer of the application 'fetchmail'. Author of several works, including The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming.
Robertson, Michael	Nationality: USA Founder and chairman of Linspire, Inc (formerly Lindows), developers of the Linspire Linux distribution. Founder and ex-CEO of MP3.com
S
Shuttleworth, Mark	Nationality: South African Venture Capitalist and founder of the Shuttleworth Foundation. The foundation is responsible for development of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
Stallman, Richard M.	Nationality: USA Founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project in 1984. Principal author of the GNU Compiler Collection, Emacs and other GNU utilities.
Szulik, Matt	Nationality: USA CEO of Red Hat, Inc.
T
Tanenbaum, Andrew	Nationality: USA Creator of the Minix operating system which influenced Linus Torvalds in his creation of Linux.
Torvalds, Linus	Nationality: Finnish Inventor of Linux. (please see our Linus Torvalds biography)
Tridgell, Andrew	Nationality: Australian Creator of Samba and a number of other Free Software tools.
Ts'o, Ted	Nationality: USA Kernel contributor and member of Linux International
U
V
van Rossum, Guido	Nationality: Dutch Creator of the Python programming language
Volkerding, Patrick	Nationality: USA Founder and maintainer of Slackware Linux distribution
W
Wall, Larry	Nationality: USA Creator of the Perl programming language
Welsh, Matt	Nationality: USA Kernel contributor and author of the popular books Linux Installation and Getting Started and Running Linux
Wirzenius, Lars	Nationality: Finnish Original kernel contributor and classmate of Linus Torvalds
Woodford, Warren	Nationality: USA Developer of the MEPIS Linux distribution.
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Y
Young, Bob	Nationality: Canadian Co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat Inc.
Z