Raphael Levien (also known as Raph Levien) is an influential member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. He is currently employed by Google. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
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Advogato is a social website for the free software community that was founded by Levien in November 1999, who had two principal motivations: first, to test his ideas of attack-resistant trust metrics, and secondly to provide a development-focused forum for the free software community that was free of the kind of commercial motivations of such sites as Sourceforge.
The site has been successful from the point of view of the first criterion, surviving many attacks aimed at subverting the attack metric, made both by developers trying out attacks, and by spammers. The site has needed only relatively minor changes to cope with these. The site's trust metric provides, alongside Epinions, one of the two most important datasets used in empirical analysis of trust metrics and reputation systems. Levien observed that Google's PageRank algorithm can be understood to be an attack resistant trust metric rather similar to that behind Advogato.[1]
The site has had a more rocky road as a forum for free software developers, and currently hosts less discussion than at its peak as developers have moved from forums to weblogs. Due to this, Advogato has added a syndication feature which includes the weblogs of its current certified developer base. It remains one of the earlier networking sites, and is still a place for active discussion on development of free software.
Raph Levien's main research interest is in the theory of imaging, that is, rendering pictures and fonts so that they can be displayed electronically. He has written several papers on his research in halftoning technology, which have been implemented in the Gimp-Print free software package, as well as by several commercial implementations.
Dr. Levien created Gill, the Gnome Illustration Application which aimed to support the W3C SVG standard for Vector Graphics. He states it was named after Eric Gill, the English type designer responsible for the Gill Sans, Perpetua and Joanna fonts. Direct development on Gill ceased around the year 2000, but a fork of its code base has evolved to Sodipodi and through it to Inkscape.
In 2009, Levien completed a PhD thesis entitled 'From Spiral to Spline: Optimal Techniques in Interactive Curve Design'[2] and published an essay on the mathematical history of Elastica as a standalone essay.[3] He calls the Elastica "A beautiful family of curves based on beautiful mathematics and a rich and fascinating history."
Since 2010, his work with Google has largely focused on introducing high-quality, open licensed, well organized webfonts to the internet through Google's webfont API.[4] Here, his experience with typographical technology, history and industry[2] has helped to shape the development of this growing resource.
One of his own fonts, Inconsolata (named in 2009 as one of the ten best programming fonts by Hivelogic,[5] and generally known for its clean lines and elegant design) is now available within the Google library.[6]
ZD-Net's Interactive week summarised the issue that patents pose to the free software community:[7]
As a resolution to this conflict, in March 2000, Raph made a patent grant of his patent portfolio to the GPL community. This step was considered by some to have set a good example, and it has been suggested that it has set a precedent for IBM's subsequent patent grant, which followed two years later.
Raph played a small part in precipitating the relaxation of the US crypto export legislation, by filing for a Commodities Jurisdiction Request for a t-shirt containing an implementation of the RSA encryption algorithm, in four lines of Perl. At the time (1995), the code on the t-shirt would have been regarded as a munition by the United States and other NATO governments.
He is divorced, with two sons: Alan and Max. He is a member of the Berkeley Monthly Meeting[8] of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). He currently lives with his partner, Seth, in Berkeley.[9]