Jim Gettys

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jim Gettys in January 2006

Jim Gettys is a computer programmer. Currently, he is at the One Laptop Per Child project working to create the $100 laptop. He is Vice President of Software, responsible for the laptops' system software. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on it again with X.Org, where he served on the board of directors. He previously served on the GNOME foundation board of directors. He worked at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification in the Internet Engineering Task Force. Jim helped establish the handhelds.org community, from which the development of Linux on handheld devices can be traced.

Gettys worked at HP Labs' Cambridge Research Laboratory. He won the 1997 Internet Plumber of the Year award on behalf of the group who worked on HTTP/1.1. Gettys is one of the keepers of the Flame (USENIX's 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award) on behalf of The X Window System Community at Large.

One of his main goals at OLPC is to review and overhaul much of standard Linux software, in order to make it run faster and consume less memory and power. In this context, he has pointed out a common fallacy among programmers today: that storing computed values in memory be preferable to recomputing those values later. This, he claims, is often false on current hardware, given fast CPUs and the long time it takes to recover from a potential cache miss.

He holds an BS degree from MIT in Earth and Planetary Sciences (course 12 - EAPS).

[edit] References

The Big freedesktop.org Interview (Rayiner Hashem, OSNews, 24 Nov 2003)
Interview about the One Laptops Per Child project, by LWN.net (June 2006): part I, part II.