Keith Packard

Infobox Person
name = Keith Packard

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caption = Keith Packard at OLS 2004, keeping his network up
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known_for = Programming
education = BA in mathematics
employer = Intel Corporation
occupation = Programmer
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boards = X.Org Foundation
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website = http://keithp.com/
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Keith Packard is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System.

Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s, at the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and presently with the X.Org Foundation.

After being expelled from XFree86 after disagreements (which led to the formation of the successful X.Org Server fork), he is now project lead on the experimental freedesktop.org Xserver and on the official reference implementation of X.

Packard is a Debian Developer since 2004, maintaining fontconfig (as well as being the upstream maintainer) and other packages.

Career

Packard gained a BA in mathematics from Reed College, Oregon in 1986. He worked at Tektronix, Inc. in Wilsonville, Oregon designing X terminals and Unix workstations from 1983 until 1988.

He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology X Consortium from 1988 to 1992, developing the X Window System reference implementation and standards as the senior member of a small team. He was responsible for X releases at this time.

In 1992 he moved to Portland, Oregon to work for Network Computing Devices on X terminals and computer graphics.

From 1999 he worked for SuSE from his home in Portland, Oregon on the XFree86 implementation of X.

He worked at the Cambridge Research Labs of Compaq (and now Hewlett-Packard) from 2001 until 2005 when the lab closed down.

As of August 2006, he works at Intel Corporation.

Other software Packard has worked on

* cairo
* X Window System extensions: XRender, XFixes, XDamage, XComposite, XRandR
* KDrive
* fontconfig, Xft
* Nickle (programming language)
* XDM

External links

* [http://keithp.com/ Personal site]