Linux Instructors & Experts

Built in concert with its Technical Advisory Board (which comprises leading maintainers from the Linux community), the Linux Foundation's Training Program features courses taught by expert Linux instructors, many of whom are actual community developers. Here are just some of our instructors and the development leaders who work with the Linux Foundation's training program.

Jerry Cooperstein Jerry Cooperstein has been working with Linux since 1994, developing and delivering training in both the kernel and user space. For the better part of two decades, Cooperstein worked on problems in nuclear astrophysics including supernova explosions, nuclear matter and neutron stars, general relativity, neutrinos and hydrodynamics at various national laboratories and universities in the United States and Europe. During that time, he developed state-of-the-art simulation software on many kinds of supercomputers and taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Cooperstein joined the Linux Foundation in 2009 as the Training Program Director. He currently lives in Wisconsin.

Dominic Duval Dominic Duval is the director of Enterprise Training at the Linux Foundation. He spent the last few years in the financial industry, helping Morgan Stanley and, more recently, Goldman Sachs with their vast and complex Linux deployments. As a kernel developer, Dominic started bridging the gap between enterprise environments and the Linux community more than a decade ago by writing and presenting several Linux trainings to corporate audiences. His collaboration with Red Hat Global Learning Services allowed him to deliver trainings to thousands of people and gain a privileged understanding of the needs of corporate users, especially in high performance environments.

Rudi Streif Rudi Streif has 20+ years of experience in software and hardware engineering, product development, life-cycle management and organizational leadership in the engineering consulting and test equipment industries. At Verimatrix, Streif implemented custom head-end solutions for content security and conditional access for IPTV and DVB digital television systems. Prior to that, as an engineering manager for Teradyne, he leveraged Linux for a high-speed real-time industrial image acquisition and processing system. Early in his career, Streif developed embedded software for automotive components, real-time simulators for testing suspension and stability control systems for commercial vehicles, and deadline scheduling algorithms for fault-tolerant real-time operating systems. Streif joined the Linux Foundation in 2010 as the Director of Embedded Solutions.

Jan-Simon Möller Jan-Simon Möller is a consultant and trainer for the Linux Foundations Training Program. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering with strong background in Embedded Linux ranging from realtime to selinux. More recently, his expertise includes power management and integration of new compilers.

Behan Webster Behan Webster is a Computer Engineering who has spent the past two decades in diverse tech industries such as telecom, datacom, optical, automotive, and the game industry writing code for a range of hardware from the very small to the very large. Throughout his career his work has always involved Linux most often in the areas of kernel level programming, drivers, embedded software, board bring-ups, software architecture, and build systems. He has been involved in a number of Open Source projects including being an early contributor to Debian Linux. Currently Behan is the lead consultant and founder of Converse in Code Inc, an embedded Linux engineer and project lead working on the LLVMLinux project as well as being a Trainer for the Linux Foundation. He is under the delusion he can fix most things with a "tiny little script."

Derek Carter Derek Carter is the part founder of two Linux users groups, a regular presenter at various conferences and actively contributes to several Open Source projects, including some of his own. He has worked as a senior Linux systems administrator for a Fortune 500 company, a consultant to state agencies, and as a QA engineer for a SAN storage company. As a Linux instructor, Derek has written courseware, proctored certification exams, and taught classes across the globe for the Linux Foundation, Red Hat, IBM, Novell, HP, Lockheed Martin and others. Derek is also a husband, father and woodworking enthusiast. He currently resides in Athens, Georgia with his family and works as a full-time Linux consultant and instructor.

Greg Kroah-Hartman Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers that maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, KroahHartman will continue his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment. He will also work more closely with Linux Foundation members, workgroups, Labs projects, and staff on key initiatives to advance Linux. Kroah-Hartman created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE. Kroah-Hartman is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, a member of The Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board, has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development

Jonathan Corbet Jonathan Corbet, a founder of LWN.net (Linux Weekly News), Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board member, and is the lead author of the book Linux Device Drivers, third edition, published by O'Reilly. He is an active kernel developer who consults with companies on kernel development and community relations. Jonathan got his first look at the BSD Unix source code back in 1981, when an instructor at the University of Colorado let him "fix" the paging algorithm. Ever since, he has dug around inside every system he could get his hands on, working on drivers for VAX, Sun, Ardent, and x86 systems on the way. He got his first Linux system in 1993 and has never looked back.

James Bottomley James Bottomley is a Distinguished Engineer at Novell. He is also an active member of the open source community. He is a Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver. He has also made contributions to PA-RISC Linux development in the area of DMA/device model abstraction. He was born and grew up in the United Kingdom. He went to university at Cambridge in 1985 for both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees. He joined AT&T Bell labs in 1995 to work on Distributed Lock Manager technology for clustering. In 1997 he moved to the LifeKeeper HA project. And in 2000 he went with LifeKeeper to SteelEye technology to bring HA to Linux. He has spoken before at LinuxWorld, ALS, Plumbers conference and the Kernel Summit.

Christoph Hellwig Christoph Hellwig has been working with Linux for more than 10 years, soon focusing on kernel-related issues. He has also been involved in various other Free Software projects. After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution and later joined the filesystem and storage group at SGI focusing on XFS for Linux. Since 2004 he has been self-employed doing contracting, consulting and training in the Linux Kernel and Storage world. Christoph has also served on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board.

Ted Ts'o Ted Ts'o was the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and organizes the Annual Linux Kernel Developer's Summit, which brings together the top 75 Linux Kernel Developers from all over the world for an annual face-to-face meeting. He was a founding board member of the Free Standards Group, and was chair of that organization until it merged with OSDL to form the Linux Foundation. He is one of the core maintainers for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and is the primary author and maintainer for e2fsprogs, the userspace utilities for the ext2/3/4 filesystems. At IBM, Theodore served as the architect for the Real-Time Linux development team. He is the CTO of Linux Foundation.