"Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth
grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years,
she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in
Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs
Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of
PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent
speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a
senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her
recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3.
With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its
future, and its place in business, especially where free and open
source software (FOSS) is concerned, which she shared with
Linux.com at the recent Open Web Vancouver conference..."
