Harald Welte

Harald Welte
Born	1979 (age 37–38)
Residence	Berlin, Germany
Nationality	German
Occupation	Programmer
Website	http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/

Harald Welte (born 1979) is a programmer resident in Berlin, Germany. Within the free software community, Welte is well known as a hacker of the Linux kernel and for his activities in enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL), the license that governs the use of much of free software.

Welte is also involved in a number of free software projects, such as Openmoko, (a version of Linux for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones) and the netfilter/iptables project (the core firewall mechanism in Linux-based firewall computers and routing devices). He is an active member of the Chaos Computer Club.

Until 2007, Welte was the chairman of the core team responsible for the netfilter/iptables project. He is also credited with writing the UUCP over SSL how-to, and contributions to User-mode Linux and international encryption kernel projects, among others.

Welte has become prominent for his work with gpl-violations.org, an organisation he set up in 2004 to track down and prosecute violators of the GPL, which had been untested in court until then.

Welte was Lead System Architect for Openmoko, a project to create a smartphone platform using free software. It uses the Linux kernel, together with a graphical user environment built using X.Org Server, and the Matchbox window manager. The OpenEmbedded build framework and ipkg package management system are used to create and maintain software packages.

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