Theodore Y. Ts'o

Known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems, Ts'o graduated in 1990 from MIT with a degree in computer science. After graduation he worked in the Information Systems (IS) department at MIT until 1999, where among other things he was project leader of the Kerberos V5 team.

After MIT IS he went to work for VA Linux Systems for two years. Starting December 2001, Ts'o was employed by IBM, working to improve the performance and scalability of the Linux kernel. In December 2007, he went to work for The Linux Foundation. He initially served as Chief Platform Strategist at the foundation, and in December 2008 he was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the organization. He subsequently became employed by Google, working on kernel, file system, and storage.

He has been the primary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2 and ext3 file systems, and has served as a maintainer for the ext4 file system. Ts'o has served as Treasurer for USENIX until June 2008, and chaired the annual Linux Kernel Developers Summit. He has been a Debian Developer, maintaining several packages, mostly filesystem-related ones, including e2fsprogs from March 2003.

He has been a member of the Security Area Directorate for the Internet Engineering Task Force, and was one of the chairs for the IPsec working group. Ts'o was one of the founding board members for the Free Standards Group, and served that organization as its Chairman. He was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software.