Matthias Ettrich
Matthias Ettrich is a German computer scientist and founder of the KDE and LyX projects.School
Matthias went to School in Beilstein, as he lived with his parents in Oberstenfeld, not too far away from the place he was born. He passed the Abitur in 1991. Ettrich studied for his MSc in Computer Science at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science at the University of Tübingen.Career
He currently resides in Berlin, Germany. Having seen many poor technology choices, resulting in catastrophic business failures, he is currently focused on advising start-ups and corporations on digital transformation and in sound technical decision making.Ettrich founded and furthered the LyX project in 1995, initially conceived as a university term project. LyX is a graphical frontend to LaTeX.
Since LyX's main target platform was Linux, he started to explore different ways to improve the graphical user interface, which ultimately led him to the KDE project. Ettrich founded KDE in 1996, when he proposed on Usenet a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment" for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit.
On 6 November 2009, Ettrich was decorated with the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software.
