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, worked as evaluator for IST programme submissions in the field of component-based software engineering.
email: cdaffara@conecta.it
 

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-soruce. 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
 

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

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

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

Philippe Aigrain is Head of Sector "Software Technologies" in the unit "Technologies and Engineering for Software, Systems and Services" of the European Commission Information Society Technologies R&D Programme. He was trained as a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, and holds a Doctorat and the Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches from University Paris 7. From 1972 to 1981, he worked in software engineering research labs of software companies. He was a research fellow at U.C. Berkeley in 1982. Since then, and before joining the European Commission in 1996, he headed research teams in the field of computer processing, indexing, retrieval and interaction for audiovisual media (video, music, still images). He his the author of more than 60 technical papers, as well as of papers on the economy and sociology of information exchanges.
email: Philippe.AIGRAIN@cec.eu.int

After his degrees in applied physics in 1982 in University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, Laurent began to work for the CEA, the French Atomic Energy Agency, in robotics. Further step lead him to SCSSI, the French Agency for information System Security where he was mainly concerned by standardisation and european affairs.  Following this, he was consultant in the information society domain for the French research minister. He is now working for the European Commission in the directorate general "Information Society" in the "Analysis and Policy planning unit" where he is mainly involved in information society security issues.
email: Laurent.CABIROL@cec.eu.int