b. 1968, United States — Linux Foundation Fellow; ext4 maintainer; author of `e2fsprogs`, `tune2fs`, `kerberos`
Also known as: Ts'o, tytso
Theodore "Ted" Ts'o was the first North American kernel developer — he wrote the code that connected an MIT modem pool to the internet in 1991 so that students could download Linux. Since then he has been one of the most prolific kernel contributors, best known as the long-standing maintainer of the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, which have stored the data of most Linux systems since the mid-1990s.
He authored e2fsprogs (the userspace tools for ext filesystems) and tune2fs, ported the Kerberos 5 authentication protocol to Linux, and has contributed to random-number generation, the scheduler, and many other parts of the kernel. He worked at IBM's Linux Technology Center, then at Google, and has been a Linux Foundation Fellow since 2018, paid to work on the kernel full-time.
Ts'o is known for long, patient Linux Kernel Mailing List posts that explain, rather than argue, and for an insistence on rigorous testing before anything is merged into a stable ext filesystem.
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Related people: Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Alan Cox
Discussed in:
- Chapter 4: The Filesystem Hierarchy — Filesystems
