Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American

computer programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

. 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. 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 su ...

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 scientific development company owned by mul ...

. Gettys was the co-founder of the group investigating Bufferbloat 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 Reproducible builds, also known as deterministic compilation, is a process of compiling software which ensures the resulting binary code can be reproduced. Source code compiled using deterministic compilation will always output the same binary. ...

and

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 an ...

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, whi ...

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

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, a ...

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 elsewher ...

. 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'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 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 ...

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