Matthias Ettrich (born June 14, 1972 in Bietigheim , southern Germany) is the computer scientist who founded the KDE project in 1996, when he proposed a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment" [sic] [1] for UNIX using the Qt GUI toolkit on USENET in 1996.

Ettrich also founded and furthered the LyX project in 1995, initially conceived as a university term project. LyX is a graphical frontend to TeX. The experiences his girlfriend had with LyX made him want to explore consistent graphical user interfaces (GUI) which led to the KDE project.

Ettrich studied at the Wilhelm Schickard Institute for Computer Science at the Eberhard Karls university in Tübingen. He currently resides in Oslo, Norway. He works for Trolltech as Director of Software Development, with responsibility for Qt and its development team.

External links

• The People Behind KDE: Matthias Ettrich 1
• The People Behind KDE: Matthias Ettrich 2