Patrick Volkerding

Patrick Volkerding, born October 20, 1966, is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Within the Slackware community he holds the title of Benevolent Dictator for Life and is known informally as The Man. He earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1993. In Slackware's early years a telecommunications company paid him a royalty of one dollar per copy sold, and a CD-ROM publisher then took over distribution and became his partner in Slackware Linux, Inc., in which he held a minority share. In later years he has managed the distribution with the help of many volunteers and testers. He co-wrote several Linux reference books for general readers between 1997 and 2000, and in 2014 he received the O'Reilly Open Source Award.