Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American
computer programmer. He was involved in multiple computer related projects.
Activity
Gettys worked at
DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory.
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
The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop, Children's Machine, 2B1) is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to " ...
.
From 2009 through 2014, he worked at
Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel–Lucent S.A. () was a French–American global telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a s ...
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...
.
Gettys was the co-founder of the group investigating
Bufferbloat
Bufferbloat is a cause of high latency and jitter in packet-switched networks caused by excess buffering of packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation (also known as jitter), as well as reduce the overall network throughput. ...
and the effect it has on the performance of the Internet., and was a core member of the group from 2010-2017, concluding with his publication of "The Blind Man and the Elephant", calling for the wide adoption of
Fair Queuing and
AQM techniques across the Internet, particularly RFC8290
.
[
]
Since 2017 he has been investigating the potential for
reproducible builds and
blockchain technology to make possible a more securely updatable and maintainable IoT infrastructure.
He is one of the original developers of the
X Window System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...
at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
and worked on it again with
X.Org, where he served on the board of directors.
He served on the
GNOME foundation board of directors.
He worked at the
World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working ...
(W3C) and was the editor of the
HTTP
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...
/1.1 specification in the
Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...
through draft standard.
Gettys helped establish the handhelds.org community, from which the development of
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...
on
handheld
A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physical ...
devices can be traced.
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
In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewher ...
.
He holds a
BSc
A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years.
The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...
degree from
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
in ''Earth and Planetary Sciences'' (course 12 — EAPS).
Awards
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.
References
External links
Jim Gettys' home pageat Handhelds.org
jg's ramblings(Gettys'
blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
where bufferbloat was first exposed)
bufferbloat.netwhere work on bufferbloat is taking place
The X Window System, Version 11(November, 1990)
The (Re)Architecture of the X Window System(July, 2004)
(June 1997)
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gettys, Jim
Living people
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni
Free software programmers
X Window System people
American computer programmers
Hewlett-Packard people
Linux people
1953 births