Werner Almesberger (born 13 August 1967) is an Austrian free software computer programmer and an open-source hardware designer/maker.
Contributions to Linux (free software projects) include the LILO boot loader, the initial RAM disk (initrd), the MS-DOS file system, much of the ATM code, the tcng traffic control configurator, the UML-based simulator umlsim, and the Openmoko (a version of Linux for completely open, low-cost, high-volume phones).
While a PhD student in Communications at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) he did contributions to several key pieces in the early days of the Linux kernel, in particular as developer of DOS file system, LILO bootloader (the most used Linux bootloader during the youth of the Linux kernel project)[1][2] and initrd initial RAM disk.
[6] Werner Almesberger was a system architect for Openmoko, the first project to create a smartphone platform using free software.
It used the Linux kernel, with a graphical user environment which uses X.Org Server, and the Matchbox window manager.