Pieter Van den Abeele

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Pieter Van den Abeele is the founder of Gentoo/PowerPC, a foundation connected with a distribution of the Linux computer operating system. He joined Gentoo shortly after its conception, merging Gentoo's first port into the mainline Gentoo repository, paving the way for other Gentoo Linux ports by implementing amongst many other things the Gentoo architecture keywords and portage profiles. Working together with Daniel Robbins, Pieter spearheaded the Gentoo architectures and platforms effort. He founded Gentoo for Mac OS X, for which he received a scholarship by Apple Computer. In 2004 Pieter was invited to the OpenSolaris pilot program and assisted Sun Microsystems with building a development eco-system around the Solaris operating system. Pieter was nominated for the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board and managed a team of developers to make Gentoo available on the Solaris operating system as well. Pieter is a co-author of the Gentoo Social Contract and a co-author of the Gentoo handbook.

The teams managed by Pieter Van den Abeele have shaped the PowerPC landscape with several "firsts". Gentoo/PowerPC was the first distribution to introduce PowerPC LiveCDs. Gentoo also beat Apple to releasing a full 64-bit PowerPC userland environment for the IBM PowerPC 970 (G5) processor.

Pieter Van den Abeele's academic work at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, involves the redesign of the technology at the heart of Gentoo; Portage. Pieter is currently employed as the Director of Software Applications of Genesi, a Texas-based PowerPC hardware vendor. His Gentoo-based Home Media and Communication System, based on a Freescale Semiconductor PowerPC 7447 processor won the Best of Show award at the inaugural 2005 Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Florida. Pieter is also a member of the Power.org consortium and participates in committees and workgroups focusing on disruptive business plays around the Power Architecture. Pieter Van den Abeele is also a founding member of the MetaPkg alliance between Gentoo, Apple's OpenDarwin and Fink, to coordinate porting efforts.