From LQWiki

Linux was originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. This page is dedicated to those people. Here's a list of the most important contributors to the GNU/Linux community.

Important People

• Brian Behlendorf - President of the Apache Software Foundation and creator of the Apache Web Server.
• Matthias Ettrich - Creator of the K Desktop Environment KDE.
• Miguel de Icaza - Co-founder of Ximian, the GNOME project and the Mono project. He has also been a kernel and Wine contributor.
• Eric S. Raymond - One of the primary advocates of the Open Source movement.
• Richard M. Stallman - Founder of the Free Software movement.
• Linus Torvalds - Founder of the Linux kernel.
• Larry Wall -- Creator of Perl and patch.
• Daniel Robbins - Creator of Gentoo.
• Nat Friedman Co-founder of Ximian and currently heading the Hula project. Also, has been one of the contributors to Beagle.
• Ian Murdock Founded Debian in 1993 and led the project till 1996.
• Patrick Volkerding Creator of the Slackware Linux distribution (currently the oldest active Linux distribution).