Jim Gettys

For fictional political boss from the film Citizen Kane, see Jim Gettys (political boss).

Jim Gettys at linux.conf.au, January 2006.

Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, USA. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on it again with X.Org, where he served on the board of directors. He previously served on the GNOME foundation board of directors. He worked at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is the editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification in the Internet Engineering Task Force. Gettys helped establish the handhelds.org community, from which the development of Linux on handheld devices can be traced. He is currently working on bufferbloat, as a properly working low latency Internet is required for immersive teleconferencing.

Gettys worked at HP Labs' Cambridge Research Laboratory. He won the 1997 Internet Plumber of the Year award on behalf of the group who worked on HTTP/1.1. Gettys is one of the keepers of the Flame (USENIX's 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award) on behalf of The X Window System Community at Large.

One of his main goals at OLPC was to review and overhaul much of standard Linux software, in order to make it run faster and consume less memory and power. In this context, he has pointed out a common fallacy among programmers today: that storing computed values in memory is preferable to recomputing those values later. This, he claims, is often false on current hardware, given fast CPUs and the long time it takes to recover from a potential cache miss.

He holds a BSc degree from MIT in Earth and Planetary Sciences (course 12 — EAPS).

References

• The Big freedesktop.org Interview (Rayiner Hashem, OSNews, 24 November 2003)
• Interview about the One Laptops Per Child project, by LWN.net (June 2006): part I, part II.

External links

• Jim Gettys' home page at Handhelds.org
• Jim Gettys' home page at the W3C
• jg's ramblings (Gettys' blog where bufferbloat was first exposed)
• bufferbloat.net where work on bufferbloat is taking place
• HP Labs Inventor Profile: Jim Gettys (January 2004)
• The X Window System, Version 11 (November, 1990)
• The (Re)Architecture of the X Window System (July, 2004)
• Network Performance Effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG (June 1997)
• Jim Gettys, LinkedIn