Kay Sievers is a German computer programmer, best known for developing the udev device manager of Linux,[1] systemd[2] and the Gummiboot EFI bootloader.

[3] Kay Sievers made major contributions to Linux's hardware hotplug and device management subsystems.

[4] In 2012, together with Harald Hoyer, Sievers was the main driving force behind Fedora's merging of the /lib, /bin and /sbin file-system trees into /usr, a simplification which other distributions such as Arch Linux have since adopted.

[5] In April 2014, Linus Torvalds banned Sievers from submitting patches to the Linux kernel for failing to deal with bugs that caused systemd to negatively interact with the kernel.

[2][7] Kay Sievers grew up in East Germany[8] and nowadays[when?]