Career
Packard gained a BA in mathematics from Reed College, Oregon in 1986. He worked at Tektronix, Inc. in Wilsonville, Oregon designing X terminals and Unix workstations from 1983 until 1988.
He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology X Consortium from 1988 to 1992, developing the X Window System reference implementation and standards as the senior member of a small team. He was responsible for X releases at this time.
In 1992 he moved to Portland, Oregon to work for Network Computing Devices on X terminals and computer graphics.
From 1999 he worked for SuSE from his home in Portland, Oregon on the XFree86 implementation of X.
He worked at the Cambridge Research Labs of Compaq (and then Hewlett-Packard) from 2001 until 2005 when the lab closed down.
In 2003 he was ejected from XFree86. This led to the formation of the successful X.Org Server fork. He is now project lead on the X.org project, the official reference implementation of the X Window System.
Packard became a Debian Developer in 2004, maintaining fontconfig (as well as being the upstream maintainer) and other packages.
Packard began working for Intel in August 2006.
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“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
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