Patrick Volkerding

From ArticleWorld

Patrick Volkerding is the founder and the maintainer of Slackware Linux, a popular Linux distribution. He has always played the key role in the development of Slackware Linux, which he has maintained all by himself for a long time. Most Slackware users call him The Man, and regard him as the Benevolent Dictator for Life of his project.

Contributions

The most important contribution to the open source world is, by far, the Slackware Linux distribution. Slackware Linux is one of the most popular Linux distributions, highly regarded for its stability and robustness. Although he has been criticized for some of his views (like not including Gnome among the official Slackware packages), Volkerding remains one of the most important figures in the open source community.

Late activity

Patrick Volkerding's activity has been severely impaired by a chronic disease which he fought with during 2004. The treatment and recovery lasted for quite some time, and the disease has not yet been successfully diagnosed. However, he did manage to resume work.

On December 10 2005, Patrick Volkerding announced that he has a daughter named Briah Cecilia. These major events have not had a significant impact on Slackware's quality though, and the distribution has lost none of those qualities that made it so popular.