Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

, best known for his work on 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 ...

. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the late 1980s as a member of the MIT X Consortium, XFree86 and the X.Org Foundation. In 2011, O'Reilly awarded an open source award to Packard, as "the person behind most of the improvements made on the open source desktop in the last ten years at least." He is portrayed as one of the ''Faces of Open Source''.

Career

Packard gained a BA in mathematics from

Reed College Reed College is a private university, private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor style architecture ...

Oregon Oregon () is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of its eastern boundary with Idah ...

in 1986. He worked at Tektronix, Inc. in Wilsonville, Oregon designing X terminals and

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''worksta ...

s from 1983 until 1988. He then moved to

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Greater Boston, Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most ...

to work at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

X Consortium from 1988 to 1992, developing the X Window System reference implementation and standards as the senior member of a small team. He was responsible for X releases at this time. In 1992 he returned to

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populou ...

to work for

Network Computing Devices Network Computing Devices (NCD) was a company founded in 1987 to produce a new class of products now known as a thin client. It was founded in Mountain View, CA, and when it closed it was headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. The corporate fou ...

on X terminals and computer graphics. From 1999 he worked for

SuSE SUSE ( , ) is a German-based multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux En ...

from his home in

on the XFree86 implementation of X. He worked at the Cambridge Research Labs of

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...

(and then Hewlett-Packard) from 2001 until 2005 when the lab closed down. In 2003 he was ejected from XFree86. This led to the formation of the successful X.Org Server fork. He is now project lead on the X.org project, the official

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation ...

of the

. Packard became a

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

Developer in 2004, maintaining font-config (as well as being the upstream maintainer) and other packages. Packard began working for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

in August 2006. Packard joined Debian's Technical committee in November 2013. Packard started working at Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs in January 2015. Packard started consulting for

Valve A valve is a device or natural object that regulates, directs or controls the flow of a fluid (gases, liquids, fluidized solids, or slurries) by opening, closing, or partially obstructing various passageways. Valves are technically fitting ...

in March 2017. Packard left HP Labs to join SiFive in July 2019, working on free software for

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on establi ...

-based processors, among other tasks. Packard joined

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technolog ...

in May 2021.

Other interests

Keith is a

radio ham An amateur radio operator is someone who uses equipment at an amateur radio station to engage in two-way personal communications with other amateur operators on radio frequencies assigned to the amateur radio service. Amateur radio operators ...

with callsign K7WQ. He is on the board of directors of Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC).

Software Packard has worked on

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo met ...

extensions: XRender, XFixes, XDamage, XComposite, XRandR * KDrive * font-config, Xft * Nickle * XDM * Direct Rendering Infrastructure * Snek * USB Chaos-Key driver in the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

References

External links

Personal site
*
Director of ARDC
{{DEFAULTSORT:Packard, Keith X Window System people Reed College alumni Free software programmers People from Portland, Oregon 1963 births Living people Tektronix people