Thomas G. Lane is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

dedicated to

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

. In a 2000 survey, he was listed as one of the top 10 contributors to an intended-to-be-representative sample of open-source software, having contributed 0.782% of the total code. Lane's contributions to open-source include: * Organizer of the Independent JPEG Group (IJG), * Member of the core steering committee of

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

* Co-author of the

Portable Network Graphics Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster graphics, raster-graphics file graphics file format, format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented ...

(PNG) specification * Member of the

Tagged Image File Format Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

(TIFF) advisory committee * Contributor to the Ptolemy Project

Biography

Lane holds a

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of Postgraduate education, graduate study and original resear ...

(Ph.D.) in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

, awarded in 1990. He occasionally lectures there, and at other places. He has worked for

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

, Structured Software Systems, Great Bridge,

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...

, and Crunchy Data. In July 2000, Lane was employed by Great Bridge, one of the first PostgreSQL support companies. However, the firm was dissolved in September 2001 and he moved to

, a competitor of Great Bridge at the time, to develop their version of PostgreSQL named ''Red Hat Database''. The Red Hat Database project was later cancelled, but Lane continued to work there to develop PostgreSQL. Between May 2013 and October 2015, he worked at

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and appl ...

. In 2015, Lane began working for Crunchy Data to allow more time to support the PostgreSQL community. Lane is part of the PostgreSQL core team.

PostgreSQL

Lane is a member of the core

development team. He is involved in all aspects of PostgreSQL, including new features, performance improvements, and bug evaluating and fixing.

Image formats

Independent JPEG Group

The Independent JPEG Group (IJG) is an informal group that writes and distributes a widely used free library for

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

image compression. The IJG is arguably one of the important early open source groups and a major reason why the JPEG image format is a standard. The IJG develops and maintains libjpeg, a library written entirely in C which contains a widely used implementation of a JPEG decoder, JPEG encoder and other JPEG utilities.

PNG

The original specification for the

(PNG), version 1.0, was written by Thomas Boutell and Lane, with contributions by many others. Lane is a contributing editor for PNG Specification, version 1.1.

TIFF

Lane is a member of the

(TIFF) advisory committee.

Works

Thomas G. Lane, JPEG FAQ

Thomas G. Lane, PostgreSQL Concurrency Issues

Thomas G. Lane, User interface software structures

Thomas G. Lane, Studying Software Architecture Through Design Spaces and Rules

Humor

* In disputing a JPEG patent claim: "The patent describes a three-way symbol classification; the closest analog in JPEG is a two-way classification. If the jury can count higher than two, the case will fail." * In describing the attention to detail of another software company: "The Single Unix Spec says that getopt() is supposed to be defined by , but I guess reading the spec closely is not a hobby in Redmond..." * In contributing to: "The Only Coke Machine on the Internet" "Since time immemorial (well, maybe 1970) the Carnegie-Mellon CS department has maintained a departmental Coke machine which sells bottles of Coke for a dime or so less than other vending machines around campus. As no Real Programmer can function without caffeine, the machine is very popular..." * On idiotic benchmark comparisons: "Try to carry 500 people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in an F-15. No? Try to win a dogfight in a 747. No? But they both fly, so it must be useful to compare them ... especially on the basis of the most simplistic test case you can think of. For extra points, use *only one* test case. Perhaps this paper can be described as "comparing an F-15 to a 747 on the basis of required runway length".

In modern culture

* Mentioned in the

Doom 3 ''Doom 3'' is a 2004 first-person shooter, first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by Activision. ''Doom 3'' was originally released for Microsoft Windows on August 3, 2004, adapted for Linux later that year, and Vide ...

video game readme file * Partly responsible for JPEG being standardized as the dominant computer image format on the World Wide Web

References

External links

;JPEG *, Independent JPEG Group
Jpeg FaqsAdditional features for libjpeg
;PostgreSQL
Great Bridge Developers to Keynote Open Source Database Summit; Project Management, Transaction Processing On the Agenda
''Business Wire'' (October 24, 2000)
PostgreSQL Core Team
;Other
Slashdot.org: Unsung Heroes of Open Source Software?

Dr. Dobb's Data Compression Newsletter, Issue 17, April 2001

O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2002

Mining Email Social Networks in Postgres
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lane, Tom 1955 births Living people People from Madrid Carnegie Mellon University alumni Hewlett-Packard people American computer scientists American computer programmers Free software programmers