Carlo Daffara Conecta Telematica, Italy Carlo Daffara is head of research and development at Conecta Telematica, a consulting firm specializing in open source systems. Got his degree in electrical engineering with a research work on novel approaches to the development of lightweight networking protocols for embedded systems in collaboration with the University of Durham. Since 1994 is involved in the linux and open source movement, working as part of the Pluto Group, the Italian largest linux user group. He is actively doing presentation work for open source systems in italian exhibitions and meetings, with particular attention to technical and programmer meetings. He gave talks to the i2u conference in Milan, talks at the various IPISA programmers' gathering and the Pluto Meetings. In 1999 and 2000, worked as evaluator for IST programme submissions in the field of component-based software engineering. Since 2000, he is member of the Internet Society (ISOC) working group on public software as part of the group committee, and contributed to the open source part of the article presented by ISOC to Unesco on global trends for universal access to information resources. email: cdaffara@conecta.it       Edmund Humenberger G.A.M.S., Austria Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Edmund Humenberger is working with Linux and Open Source since 1993. Back then he set up one of the first networked Linux machines in Austria. He was trained as Electronic engineer, but is now doing mainly project managment in the area of open-source. He is active lobbying the use of Open-Source-Software in Austria through Newspaper articles, PR work and exhibition-participation. In 1995 he was technical director of the ARS Electronica Festival. Since then he is involved in organising different Open-Source Conferences in Austria and Germany. He is initiator and maintainer of business-linux.at He currently works as chief-of-department at g.a.m.s. EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH in Vienna/Austria where is is implementing mid-size Linux-Projects. email: ed@atnet.at       Bernard Lang INRIA, France Bernard Lang is a Senior Investigator at INRIA, the French National Research Institute in Computer Science and Control (http://www.inria.fr). His scientific interest have covered a variety of topics including programming languages, software engineering and more recently the syntactic processing of natural languages. He is the founding secretary of AFUL, Association Francophone des Utilisateurs de Linux et des Logiciels Libres (http://www.aful.org). Many of his papers on open-source/free software may be found at http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/ecrits/ email:bernard.lang@inria.fr.       Jesús M. González-Barahona Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain Jesús M. González-Barahona is currently teaching and researching in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos de Madrid. He has a PhD. in Telecommunications by the Technical University of Madrid, and some experience in working for the industry (Telefonica de España, Sociedad Estatal V Centenario). He also worked during 7 years for Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His current research areas are: Distributed Systems, Reliable network Technologies, Fault Tolerant Systems, and Protocols for Multimedia Transmission over the Internet. He has being a libre software enthusiast since his first encounter with the GNU tools, in late 1980s. Since then, he has used and studied many pieces of libre software. He was a co-founder of PDSOFT, the first Spanish group on free software (1991), and since then has participated in the organization of several events in Spain related to libre software. Currently he teaches a subject on libre software. He is also very interested in the technical, social and economic implications of libre software. email:jgb@computer.org       Ben Laurie A.L. Digital Ltd., Apache Software Foundation, OpenSSL Group, Apache-SSL Ben Laurie is Technical Director of A.L. Digital Ltd. (http://www.aldigital.co.uk/), a core member of the Apache Group (http://www.apache.org/httpd.html), a director of the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/), a core member of the OpenSSL Group (http://www.openssl.org/, the author of Apache-SSL (http://www.apache-ssl.org/) and co-author of Apache: The Definitive Guide published by O'Reilly (http://www.ora.com/catalog/apache2/ ).He has been actively involved in free software since 1994, starting with the Apache webserver. He has been programming since 1972, professionally since 1978, and has a particular interest in computer security and cryptography. His company, A.L. Digital Ltd., is an Internet consultancy, specialising in security, secure hosting, multimedia and complex websites. email:ben@algroup.co.uk       Werner Koch Werner Koch was born 1961, he is married and living in Düsseldorf. After school, alternative service and apprenticeship as an electrician he started to work as software developer in 1985 while also studying computer science at the FH Dortmund. For several years he has been with a Duesseldorf based software firm as principal designer of their software framework. In 1991 he began to work as free-lance consultant and developer. Koch is a radio amateur since the late seventies and became interested in software development at about the same time. During the years he worked on systems ranging from small CP/M systems to mainframes, languages from Assembler to Smalltalk and applications from drivers to financial analysis systems. He uses GNU/Linux as main development platform since 1993, is the principal author of the GNU Privacy Guard and on the board of the German Unix User Group responsible for international contacts. email:werner.koch@guug.de