About the Authors

Benjamin Mako Hill is a Seattle native working out of Boston, Massachusetts. Mako is a longtime free software developer and advocate. He was part of the founding Ubuntu team and one of the first employees of Canonical Ltd. In addition to some technical work, his charge at Canonical was to help grow the Ubuntu development and user community during the project's first year. With the community off the ground, Mako left Canonical to return to graduate school at the MIT Media Lab, where he is helping out with One Laptop per Child's $100 Laptop Project. Mako has continued his involvement with Ubuntu as a member of the Community Council governance board, through development work, and through projects such as this book.

Jono Bacon (www.jonobacon.org) is an established author and consultant who works for the United Kingdom's government-funded OpenAdvantage (www.openadvantage.org) center in England. Jono spends each of his days working with businesses, education and charitable organizations, and individuals to help them move to Open Source software and Open Standards. Jono is also an experienced public speaker who has spoken around the world about Open Source, usability, and desktop and is known for his honest, humorous, and entertaining talks. In addition to this, Jono is a regular contributor to Open Source on a range of projects, has authored more than 400 articles for more than fifteen magazines and Web sites, and is the cocreator of the popular LugRadio podcast (www.lugradio.org).

Corey Burger lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and is a long-term user and contributor to Ubuntu. He is a member of the Ubuntu Documentation Team, the Laptop Testing Team, and has been involved with Ubuntu since its first release. Corey currently works with the Secure Internet Live Conferencing (SILC) Project to help deploy Ubuntu at nongovernmental organizations across Vancouver Island. Also active in promoting Ubuntu and Open Source, he has given several talks to conferences and Linux User Groups (LUGs) about Ubuntu. Corey's day job involves sales for Userful, a multiseat Linux vendor in Canada.

Jonathan Jesse is unusual in that he is a Microsoft Windows Network Administrator with a day job in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who also has a strong interest in Linux and Open Source software. He had looked at many different Linux distributions but had not found one that "just works" until Ubuntu and Kubuntu filled that bill. Since he is not a developer or a programmer, he struggled to find a way to give back to the Open Source community. Beginning with the Hoary Hedgehog release, Jonathan joined the Ubuntu Documentation Team by proofreading and submitting patches to the mailing list. He then started working on the Kubuntu documents. He has started testing builds for the Laptop Testing Team, works on bugs for the Kubuntu team, and helps out on the wiki as well. Ubuntu and Kubuntu have given Jonathan a way to give back to the community without having to be a developer, and he encourages everyone to come help him out.

Ivan Krsti is a software architect and journalist currently on leave of absence from Harvard University. Ivan has been using Debian Linux since late 1994. He switched to Ubuntu with its first release, and is now one of the administrators of the Ubuntu Server Team. He previously served as Director of Research at the Medical Informatics Laboratory at Zagreb Childrens Hospital, where he depended on Ubuntu Server for mission-critical backend tasks. Ivan is presently building the user stack architecture and worrying about security for the One Laptop Per Child project.