| Theodore Y. Ts'o | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1968 (age 43–44) Palo Alto, California |
| Residence | Medford, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Ted |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Involvement in FOSS |
Theodore Y. "Ted" Ts'o (born 1968) is a software developer mainly known for his contributions to the Linux kernel, in particular his contributions to file systems.
He 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, he 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.
Ts'o initially served as Chief Platform Strategist at the foundation.[1] In December 2008, he was appointed to Chief Technology Officer of the organization. Ts'o replaced Markus Rex, who has returned to Novell.[2]
As of January 2010, Ts'o is employed by Google.[3] He stated "I’m going to be working on kernel, file system, and storage stuff."[4]
He is the primary developer and maintainer of e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2 and ext3 filesystems, and is a maintainer for the ext4 file system.
Ts'o served as Treasurer for USENIX until June 2008, and has chaired the annual Linux Kernel Developers Summit.
Ts'o is a Debian Developer, maintaining several packages, mostly filesystem-related ones, including e2fsprogs since March 2003.
He was a member of the Security Area Directorate for the Internet Engineering Task Force, and was one of the chairs for the IPsec working group. He was one of the founding board members for the Free Standards Group, and currently serves that organization as its Chairman.
In 1994, he created /dev/random and the corresponding kernel driver, which was Linux's (and Unix's) first kernel interface that provided high quality cryptographic random numbers to user programs.[5] /dev/random works without access to a hardware random number generator, allowing user programs to depend upon its existence. Separate daemons such as rngd take random numbers from such hardware and make them accessible via /dev/random.[6] Since its creation, /dev/random and /dev/urandom have become standard interfaces on Unix, Linux, BSD and Mac OS systems.[7] Many notable programs and facilities such as Pretty Good Privacy, GNU Privacy Guard, Globally unique identifiers, IPsec, and Filesystem-level encryption depend on /dev/random.
Ts'o was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software.
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