Mr. Matthias Ettrich

A German computer scientist / software engineer, he is known for his contributions to the KDE and LyX projects. Born in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Baden-W?rttemberg) he lived with his parents in Oberstenfeld, not too far away from the school he attended in Beilstein. He passed the Abitur in 1991. He studied for his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science at the Eberhard Karls University of T?bingen. He currently resides in Berlin, Germany where he works for Nokia as Chief Architect. He founded and developed the LyX project in 1995; initially conceived as a university term project. LyX is an open source document processor based on top of the LaTeX typesetting system. Unlike most word processors, which follow the WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") paradigm, LyX has a WYSIWYM ("what you see is what you mean") approach, where what shows up on the screen is only an approximation of what will show up on the page. Since LyX largely functions as a front-end to the LaTeX typesetting system, it has the power and flexibility of LaTeX, and can handle documents including books, notes, theses, to academic papers, letters, etc. LyX is popular among technical authors and scientists for its advanced mathematical modes, though it is increasingly used by non-mathematically-oriented scholars as well for its bibliographic database integration and ability to manage multiple files. LyX has also become popular among self-publishers. LyX is available for various operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, UNIX, OS/2 and Haiku. LyX can be redistributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is thus free software. Since LyX's main target platform was Linux, he began to explore different ways to improve the graphical user interface, which ultimately led him to the KDE project. He founded KDE in 1996, when he proposed on Usenet a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment" [sic] for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit. He is also the creator of the KDE desktop environment, an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. It is known for its Plasma Desktop, a desktop environment which is provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia and Kubuntu and is default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system. The goal of the community is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs of an end-user as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard, the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology including Calligra Suite, digiKam, Rekonq, K3b, and many others. On November 6, 2009, he was decorated with the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software.