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

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

due to his work on HAL,

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

Metacity Metacity was the default window manager used by the GNOME 2 desktop environment until it was replaced by Mutter in GNOME 3. It is still used by GNOME Flashback, a session for GNOME 3 that provides a similar user experience to the Gnome 2.x seri ...

GConf GConf was a system used by the GNOME desktop environment for storing configuration settings for the desktop and applications. It is similar to the Windows Registry. It was deprecated as part of the GNOME 3 transition. Migration to its replacemen ...

, and

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project, ...

History

Havoc Pennington graduated from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1998. After graduation, he worked at

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

as a Desktop manager/engineer for nine years, ending in 2008. He also founded the project

freedesktop.org freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Hav ...

in 2000. He promoted the idea of the

Gnome Online Desktop A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its character ...

in 2007. For a time, he led the development of the 2006–2009

Mugshot A mug shot or mugshot (an informal term for police photograph or booking photograph) is a photographic portrait of a person from the shoulders up, typically taken after a person is arrested. The original purpose of the mug shot was to allow law e ...

project. From 2008 until June 2011, he worked on a consumer product for the startup company

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 (referred to as "easel mode") and a cloud-based operating system called litl OS. Origins Litl's CEO John ...

(hardware, and proprietary software and services). From 2011 to 2015 he worked for Typesafe (now

Lightbend Lightbend, formerly known as Typesafe, is a company founded by Martin Odersky, the creator of the Scala (programming language), Scala programming language, Jonas Bonér, the creator of the Akka (toolkit), Akka middleware, and Paul Phillips (poker ...

). In 2017 he cofounded Tidelift, which seeks to improve the ecosystem around open source software by providing support for professional teams using open source and helping maintainers build sustainable businesses around their projects.

Publications

* Havoc Pennington, ''GTK+ /Gnome Application Development'', Sams, , 1999.

References

External links

* *
Havoc Pennington
on

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

GNOME developers Free software programmers 1970s births Living people American computer programmers University of Chicago alumni Red Hat employees {{compu-bio-stub fr:Freedesktop.org#Havoc Pennington