Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American

computer programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles ''software developer'' and ''software engineer'' are used for jobs that require a progr ...

Activity

Gettys worked at DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. 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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

and worked on it again with X.Org, where he served on the board of directors. 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 multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, France. The company focused on Fixed line telephone, fixed, Mobile phone, mobile and telecommunications convergence, ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

. Gettys was the co-founder of the group investigating

bufferbloat Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too many data packets. Bufferbloat can also cause packet delay variation (also known as jitter), as well as reduce the overall network thro ...

and the effect it has on the performance of the Internet. He was a core member of the group from 2010 to 2017, concluding with his publication of "The Blind Man and the Elephant", calling for the wide adoption of

fair queuing Fair queuing is a family of scheduling algorithms used in some process and network schedulers. The algorithm is designed to achieve fairness when a limited resource is shared, for example to prevent flows with large packets or processes that gen ...

and active queue management techniques across the Internet, particularly RFC8290. He served on the

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

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 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(W3C) and was the editor of the

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) 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 Web, wher ...

/1.1 specification in the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

through draft standard. Gettys helped establish the handhelds.org community, from which the development of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

handheld A mobile device or handheld device is a computer small enough to hold and operate in hand. Mobile devices are typically battery-powered and possess a flat-panel display and one or more built-in input devices, such as a touchscreen or keypad. Mod ...

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

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

s 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 elsew ...

. He holds a BSc degree from

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 USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

's 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award) on behalf of The X Window System Community at Large.

References

External links

Jim Gettys' home page
at Handhelds.org
jg's ramblings
(Gettys'

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

where bufferbloat was first exposed)
bufferbloat.net
where 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