Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington (born c. 1976) is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur.

He is known in the free software community

Free software community

The free-software community is an informal term that refers to the users and developers of free software as well as supporters of the free-software movement. The movement is sometimes referred to as the open-source software community or a subset thereof...

 due to his work on HAL (software)

HAL (software)

HAL was a software project providing a hardware abstraction layer for Unix-like computer systems.HAL is now deprecated on GNU/Linux systems, with functionality being merged into udev as of 2008–2010...

, GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

, Metacity

Metacity

Metacity was the window manager used by default in the GNOME desktop environment until GNOME 3, where it was replaced by Mutter. The development of Metacity was started by Havoc Pennington and it is released under the GNU General Public License....

, GConf

GConf

GConf is a system used by the GNOME desktop environment for storing configuration settings for the desktop and applications.Changes to this system are controlled by GConfd, a daemon. GConfd watches out for changes to the database, and when they are changed, it applies the new settings to...

, and D-BUS

D-Bus

In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication open-source system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. An implementation of D-Bus supports most POSIX operating...

.

Career

He is a 1998 graduate of the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

.

He was one of the main developers of Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

 GNU/Linux, and also founded the project freedesktop.org

Freedesktop.org

freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000.The organisation focuses on the user....

 in 2000.

He was a Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

 Desktop manager/engineer for 9 years, ending in 2008.

He promoted the idea of the Gnome Online Desktop in 2007.

At some point, he led the development of the 2006-2009 Mugshot project.

he works on a consumer product for the startup company Litl

Litl

The litl webbook is a webbook developed, marketed and sold by litl LLC. It features the ability to stand upright in an inverted-V position and a cloud-based operating system called litl OS...

, a consumer product that involves hardware, and proprietary software and services.

External links

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