Sven Vermeulen is a long term contributor to various free software projects and the author of various online guides and resources. He got his first taste of free software in 1997 and never looked back since then. In 2003, he joined the ranks of the Gentoo Linux project as a documentation developer and has crossed several roles after that, including Gentoo Foundation’s trustee, council member, project leads for documentation, and (his current role) project lead for Gentoo Hardened’s SELinux integration.

In this time frame, he has gained expertise in several technologies, ranging from operating system level knowledge to application servers as he used his interest in security to guide his projects further: security guides using SCAP languages, mandatory access controls through SELinux, authentication with PAM, (application) firewalling, and more.

On SELinux, he has contributed several policies to the reference policy project and participates actively in policy development and user space development projects.

Sven is an IT infrastructure architect working at a European financial institution. Secured implementation of infrastructure (and the surrounding architectural integration) is of course an important part of this. Prior to this, he graduated with an MSc in Computer Engineering at the University of Ghent and then worked as a web application infrastructure engineer with IBM WebSphere AS.

Sven is the main author of Gentoo’s Handbook which covers the installation and configuration of Gentoo Linux on several architectures. He also authored the Linux Sea online publication, which is a gentle introduction to Linux for novice system administrators.