Raph Levien

Raph Levien is an influential member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript.

Advogato

Imaging

Raph Levien's main research interest is in the theory of imaging, that is,rendering pictures and fonts so that they can be displayed electronically.He has written several papers on his research in halftoning technology,which have been implemented in the Gimp-Print free software package,as well as by several commercial implementations.

Influence in Free Software community

In March 2000, Raph made a [http://www.advogato.org/article/89.html patent grant] of his patent portfolio to the GPL community. This step was considered by some to have set a [http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/prc/2003-March/002315.html good example] , and it has been suggested that it has set a precedent for IBM's subsequent patent grant, which followed two years later.

Activism against encryption export regulations

Raph played a small part in precipitating the relaxation of the US crypto export legislation, by filing for a [http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/340.html Commodities Jurisdiction Request] for a t-shirt containing an implementation of the RSA encryption algorithm, in four lines of Perl. At the time (1995), the code on the t-shirt would have been regarded as a munition by the United States and other NATO governments.

Personal life

He is divorced, with two sons: Alan and Max. He is a member of the Berkeley Monthly Meeting [ [http://www.quaker.org/berkmm/ Berkeley Monthly Meeting website.] ] of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

References

External links

* [http://www.advogato.org/person/raph Profile raph] at Advogato
* [http://www.levien.com/patents.html Text of Levien's patent grant]